{"id":221,"date":"2006-09-25T15:34:19","date_gmt":"2006-09-25T12:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.void.gr\/kargig\/blog\/?p=221"},"modified":"2006-09-25T18:57:46","modified_gmt":"2006-09-25T15:57:46","slug":"terminal-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.void.gr\/kargig\/blog\/2006\/09\/25\/terminal-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Terminal Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terminal<\/em> as a noun from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:<\/p>\n

5 : a combination of a keyboard and output device (as a video display unit) by which data can be entered into or output from a computer or electronic communications system<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As posted before in “to xft or not to xft ?”<\/a> my favorite terminal is mrxvt (materm)<\/a> and my favorite shell is zsh. I am still having problems viewing\/writing greek text on mrxvt though. So I tried using some other terminals to see what fitted more my needs.<\/p>\n

First terminal of choice, Konsole<\/a>.
\nNice terminal, lots of easily configured options, ability to monitor a terminal for silence or activity and so on and so on. Greek text displayed perfectly, fonts looked quite good too. The negative part of Konsole ? It’s a KDE application and since I don’t use KDE but fluxbox, it takes a decent amount of time to start with all that ksycoca stuff that need to start before I finally view….a terminal. 2-3 seconds of wait time for a just a terminal is TOO much, and I don’t want to have kdeinit started just to speed up KDE applications. I picked up fluxbox so I wouldn’t be forced to have 10 kde\/gnome daemons sitting on the background and eating up my ram.<\/p>\n

Second terminal of choice, Gnome-Terminal<\/a>.
\nIn comparison to Konsole it’s ugly. Fewer configuration options, fewer features, but displayed greek text as good as Konsole did. It also takes a lot less time to start than Konsole does. But it’s ugly. Oh, it’s ugly too.<\/p>\n

Third terminal of choice, rxvt<\/a>.
\nThis is supposedly the base of mrxvt and urxvt. Guess what…no xft support at all. So this goes immediatly down the drain. It only works with my good old lucida-console-8859-7…I have mrxvt for that though.
\nEven the project’s homepage points to sourceforge. No website no extra information…nothing. Last release: <\/p>\n

rxvt-dev \t2.7.10 \tMarch 25, 2003<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shall I say old ? deprecated ? anyway… <\/p>\n

Then I did some tests with two greek documents. I opened my xterm with my old lucida-console-iso-8859-7 font, fired up vim and typed some greek text in 2 files. In the first I picked fileencoding=iso-8859-7 and in the second fileencoding=utf-8. What I saw was that when I executed “cat filename” I only saw the contents of the first file on any of terminals (mrxvt doesn’t count :P). All this time I thought that I was using utf-8…but I guess I didn’t. In order to make sure I found agorf<\/a> on IRC and asked him to “cat” them. He is using rxvt-unicoce (urxvt)<\/a> and utf-8 and he could only see the second file. I installed urxvt and then I thought that it was finally time for a change. I had already the unicode flag on my gentoo USE flags, so I only had to change the locale of LC_CTYPE from LC_CTYPE=el_GR to LC_CTYPE=el_GR.utf8
\nI restarted Xorg…and I could now cat and read the contents of only the second filename. I am now sure I use UTF-8 on my terminals.<\/p>\n

Now I started checking out my terminals again.
\na) mrxvt
\nmrxvt denied reading greek text…again (what a surprise!). It does not support utf-8.
\nexcerpt from mrxvt.faq<\/p>\n

\nQ: Does mrxvt support UTF-8 locale\/encoding method?<\/p>\n

A: Not now. This is a planned work and hopefully will be supported in the next development branch (0.5.x).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have mrxvt 0.5.1 installed and utf-8 is still not supported.<\/p>\n

b) Konsole
\ndisplayed utf-8 text just fine.<\/p>\n

c) Gnome-terminal
\ndisplayed utf-8 text just fine.<\/p>\n

d) urxvt
\ndisplayed utf-8 text just fine.<\/p>\n

e) rxvt
\nYou must be kidding right ? What are you looking for here ? results ? …<\/p>\n

But then I noticed something weird. While writing (not just viewing) greek (using utf-8) on the shell my terminal dissapeared, whichever that was. But it only happened when I was logged in as a user and not as root. The difference between my user and the root account on my box, is that I use zsh as user and bash as root. So I went to zsh’s site to check out their faq. I read http:\/\/zsh.dotsrc.org\/FAQ\/zshfaq02.html#l16 and freaked out! Zsh can display some unicode..but zle has problems when you write unicode. DAMN! So, 2 of my favorite linux choices haven’t got proper unicode support, mrxvt and zsh. Thankfully Fluxbox recently fixed their unicode support, else that would be 3 strikes on a row…<\/p>\n

It was time I emerged -C (that means uninstall for the non Gentoo users) Konsole, Gnome-terminal and of course rxvt. I did not need them any more. Luckilly fluxbox can provide tab support for applications so I can make up for urxvt’s lack of tabs by using fluxbox’s tab support. I am now in the process of creating a theme for urxvt that will look and behave a bit like mrxvt.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if I am asking too much as a user or it is too soon for linux to fully adopt unicode. It looks kind of strange to me how some applications are nowdays lacking unicode support. I wonder if they’ll ever have. Maybe there are not that many non-english speaking developers for these applications to push\/force\/write code for\/etc these applications in order to move faster implementing unicode…I don’t know what else to say.<\/p>\n

ZSH and mrxvt developers PLEASE fix your applications as soon as possible !!!<\/p>\n

Terminal<\/em> as a adjective from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:<\/p>\n

\n1 a : of or relating to an end, extremity, boundary, or terminus <a terminal pillar> b : growing at the end of a branch or stem <a terminal bud >
\n2 a : of, relating to, or occurring in a term or each term <terminal payments> b (1) : leading ultimately to death : FATAL <terminal cancer> (2) : approaching or close to death : being in the final stages of a fatal disease <a terminal patient> (3) : of or relating to patients with a terminal illness <terminal care> c : extremely or hopelessly severe <terminal boredom>
\n3 a : occurring at or constituting the end of a period or series : CONCLUDING <the terminal moments of life> b : not intended as preparation for further academic work <a terminal curriculum><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think that my terminals have terminal problems…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Terminal as a noun from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: 5 : a combination of a keyboard and output device (as a video display unit) by which data can be entered into or output from a computer or electronic communications system As posted before in “to xft or not to xft ?” my favorite terminal is mrxvt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t