[u-u] Terminal Emulation

[Eric Siegerman]

[The first draft of this came out pretty flamish, but that's due
to my frustration with the situation we're talking about, *not*
directed at anyone here.  I hope no flamage remains, but if any
does, please don't take it personally...]


On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 17:47 -0400, Claude Morin wrote:
> Does anyone have substantive information about PuTTY's
> shortcomings?  To this point I've seen only invective.  Heck,
> PuTTY's terminal emulation (sorry Vance: here's a definition
> for you :-) even supports tall/wide characters.

My first issue with Putty is that it runs in a DOS window,
instead of providing its own (Vance: is this what you meant by
"not a terminal emulator"?); and DOS windows are broken.
Blockwise cut/paste rather than linewise, for one thing; for
another, it sometimes gets into a weird state where new output is
overlaying old -- IIRC, when the window scrolls, the new bottom
line is populated with old text from the history buffer, rather
than being empty as it should be.  ISTR there are other issues as
well.  Not all of that is Putty's fault, of course; but putting
the blame on M$ where it belongs, emotionally satisfying as that
may be, doesn't make it any easier to get work done.

Cygwin also suffers from this; it replaces cmd.exe but not the
underlying text-window implementation.  I put up with that to get
Cygwin's other benefits, and because there isn't an alternative I
like any better.  But since, for straight terminal emulation,
there *is* an alternative that I much prefer, I've reluctantly
decided to use it despite my political objections.


Secondly, Putty follows X-Windows's copy-on-select convention,
rather than the Mac/MS-Windows convention in which Select and
Copy are distinct operations.  SecureCRT can be configured either
way.  For those who like copy-on-select, fine, but personally I
hate hate HATE it; it messes me up almost every time I use it.
So given a choice between a terminal emulator that supports the
convention I prefer, and one that doesn't, I opt for the former.


None of this is meant to say that Putty is shite -- I don't
believe it is.  But Putty, or rather the combination of it and
the DOS window it runs in, gets in my way.

So does every other Windows terminal emulator I've tried.  Some
also insist on copy-on-select; others are crashy; some are
missing another feature I depend on -- a 1000s-of-lines-long
buffer, which I can dependably cut'n'paste all of.  Still others
have different problems that I can no longer recall.  The only
one I've found with the union of all my "gotta have it"
requirements, and none of my showstoppers, is SecureCRT.

(That goes for most of the *nix ones too -- xterm, rxvt, etc.
About the only *nix terminal emulator I like is Gnome Terminal.
Fortunately it's open source.)

> What functionality justifies using a closed-source solution?

Well, clearly all I've said justifies that decision for me.
Whether it justifies it for you, only you can decide.

At my last contract, I made do with open-source.  Writing this
post has made me realize that I don't want to make do again; if
my next client doesn't want to spring for SecureCRT, I'll buy my
own copy.  So thanks for asking; you've helped me to clarify my
own position :-)

That said, it turns out that there's a gnome-terminal port to
Cygwin (not as part of the main distribution; it's at
http://sourceware.org/cygwinports/).  I just tried, and failed,
to get that running.  It's not important enough to spend more
time on just for this email, but the next time I need a Windows
terminal emulator, I'll put some more effort into it.  I hope
it'll suffice; I really would rather use Open Source...


On Tue, 2011-05-10 at 11:50 -0400, Renata Rocha wrote:
> Any great updates from Secure CRT 4.1 that would convince people here
> to buy the upgrades?

That, I'm afraid I don't know -- I don't think I've used a newer
version myself.

  - Eric