[u-u] Terminal Emulation

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 19:28 -0400, Claude Morin wrote:
> No worries, it wasn't flamish.

Well, except that I shot off my mouth without taking the time to
verify my assertions :-(  But thanks.


> Overall I think you were using a severely broken copy of PuTTY, or had
some other severe problem with your system.  See detailed comments
below.

Or more likely, a (not-so-severe) problem with my brain.  I'm
pretty sure I was misremembering -- it's been a couple of years
-- and that a lot of the pain I described was in fact with
(Cygwin + DOS_window), not with PuTTY at all.

> On 13 May 2011 16:38, Eric Siegerman <pub08-uu at davor.org> wrote:
> My first issue with Putty is that it runs in a DOS window,
>         instead of providing its own
>         
> 
> Sorry, this is simply incorrect.  PuTTY runs in its own non-DOS
window.  But see below for Cygwin. 
> [...]
> Just to be sure all of our loyal readers get this: PuTTY does not use
a DOS window.  Honest.  It implements its own terminal emulator.

Yup, Claude's right.  Mea maxima culpa.


> For me it's not just about politics.  I'm also a Cheap Bastard (TM)
[...]

Well, me too.  Draft 0.5 violated your (TM) :-)

> Given that Open Source tools get used by and developed by other
Demanding Bastards, they're typically a much better fit for my needs.

Oh, I'm on the same page about that all right!


> I touch type [...] I'm also mostly a command line guy

Me too.  Dyed in the wool.

> so using the mouse or a menu item to copy and paste is absolutely
unacceptable.

For me, that doesn't follow.  I already had to use the mouse to
select the text to be copied, or to point to where I want to
paste it; so I've already context-switched from keyboard to
mouse; so choosing Copy or Paste from the right-click menu (which
gnome-terminal, among others, supports) isn't a further context
switch.  The flow's already broken, so it's hard to break it
further :-/

What's wrong, for me, with copy-on-select is that I frequently
want to *replace* some existing text with the contents of the
paste buffer (canonical, if dated, example: copy a URL, then
paste it into the browser's URL bar, replacing the URL that's
already there).  Copy-on-select means that I can't highlight the
text to be replaced, because that blows away my paste buffer.  I
have to either make sure to mouse-erase the doomed text *first*
(which is three window switches instead of one -- I usually run
with windows maximized) or erase it using the keyboard (when I'm
already in mouse context).

I think a lot of this particular preference comes down to which
windowing system one (extensively) used first.  I learned to "do"
windowing the Mac Way, not the X-Windows Way, so that's the way
my hands and brain are wired.  (Though I'm old enough to have
used 6th-Edition Bell-Labs UNIX, I spent a decade and a half in
the wilderness, working with with AmigaOS, Windows, and MacOS
Classic, in that chronological order (plus G[no E, I'm not *that*
old]COS and RSX, but those don't count -- they were strictly
command-line, using real, unemulated, RS-232-talking terminals
:-)))

> having to hit <CTRL><C> to copy would seriously mess me up.

No $&@*!  But <CTRL><INS> is the shortcut for Copy in terminal
emulators.  (I think the <CTRL><INS> / <SHIFT><INS> pair
originally comes from MS-DOS; not sure though.)


> For example Gnome Terminal makes me insane

Well, it's not my ideal, but on *nix I haven't found anything
better.  Frankly, there have been times I've wished Van Dyke
would port SecureCRT to Linux.


Conclusion: most of my gripes about PuTTY were bullcrap, but the
one that isn't, is for me still a showstopper.

  - Eric