Perfecting the terminal application.
 

I have a list of requirements for osso-xterm (or another terminal, perhaps real XTerm rather than this one), so I'd like to collect ideas so I'm not kludging/developing ideas which nobody else would like, or missing a cool feature that somebody else thinks of.

My main aim is to be comfortable sshing to a screen session where I can read my email in alpine, chat in irssi (with bitlbee for jabber) and various other windows that I use from time to time, even some basic coding.

I've been doing this for over 10 years from the Nokia 9000 all the way via the e90 and N97 to the n900 and I've had to put up with various (typically hardware) deficiencies on each platform, with the 9300/9500 and e90 probably being the best at being terminal emulators for me. Sadly they were large and pretty featureless as phones as times move on (to be fair, they were great in their day).

I only _JUST_ got the N97 s2putty working the way I like it, with some patches of my own and various enhancements from people working on the code. The n900 takes an annoying step back for me and I have a list of things which I feel would be great.

This boils down to a few key (scuse the pun) issues. The keys I use a lot, the terminal size/font screen layout and the niceties.

I want Ctrl to be sticky.

I want easier access to [ | and maybe ~ and ^

I want exactly 80x24 in fullscreen with a nice rich font full UTF-8 goodness.

I want the Up swipe gesture to send a Tab (or better to make gestures a general configuration).

I want to be able to cut and paste with ease, and ideally match URLs to spawn the browser.

I have almost achieved a lot of these and will follow up with details.

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

I use Ctrl-A an awful lot, n900's Ctrl is non sticky and far too close to the A key for comfort. I don't like the idea of an android/connectbot option of Ctrl being one of the weird other buttons like camera or rollyball, I want Ctrl to be the Ctrl key and I want it sticky.

So... I sshed to a UNIX box with xkbset using -X on the ssh so I have X forwarding. However when I run "xkbset st" I get Ctrl to be sticky, but this turns off sticky shift and I don't know why. Does anyone know?

I'm guessing it's a non +accessx capability compiled in to the window manager as a whole and so will require running a patched version of whatever is doing this to add Ctrl to it, or remove shift and let xkb do it.

Ideas?

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

This thread might interest you.

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

Can I also direct attention to 2 languishing bugs that affect xterm & GNU screen usability:

"Enter" key sends wrong keycode to console applications
ENTER key stops working in XTerm

* UTF-8 would be very nice
* I'm happy with CTRL-I instead of Tab
* I'm resigned that cut & paste will never be "with ease" on a device this size (especially with the font size I use). It's a stylus job each time for me, dwarfing the effort of selecting cut/paste from the menu.

Very interested to hear your "further details"!

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

I can map pointless keys like £ and € to be | and [ (I use the latter to enter cut and paste mode, though it dawns on me that escape also works and is a useful key, or should I use Ctrl-[ which IS escape?).

But there is still a general issue of the not so nice pop up window for the funny extra keys. Ctrl-Fn isn't that easy to hit, the keys you use a lot are spread around a window full of ridiculous keys like some weird percent with an extra 0 that I've never seen before in my life.

I think this window should be brought up with a gesture like downswipe so you're already over the window not the keyboard, and maybe have it show a frequently used list at the top which is what the N97 did.

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

clicked on my link above?

there is explained how to get something like this:

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

I forgot about easy access to the time and signal strength (things I used to like in the 9210*, 9500, 9300), which I put up without in the e90 and n97, as they ran fullscreen for S60 limitation reasons. However, seeing as "New" and "Copy" are also on the top bar, I kinda need that around, and the way to get that bar to appear is to press a button on the bottom bar.

*Worst Communicator "upgrade" ever. I can't recall if 9000 and 9110 had status bar on view in telnet.

So I'm not sure if I want full screen or a screen cut off slightly with a status bar of sorts. It's a trade of between functionality and ease of reading a large font vs one which obviously must be smaller.

There needs to be some way to get the top or bottom bar to appear without their already existing! I can only turn off the bottom bar with a gconftool-2 command. I also don't like the screen size changing, I always want it to claim to be 80x24 to whatever underlying system I'm connected to.

Okay sure with the top and bottom bar there and the thread (which I'd already posted to before starting this one) about improving the bottom bar options, you gain all the key presses you might possibly need, but I'd still like the norm to have a large readable font most of the time, and have those extra weird keys available as perhaps gestures, so it doesn't require terminal realestate to be eaten up for the majority of the time when I don't need them.

Now, getting 80x24 is a whole new can of worms. The closest I can get in full screen is 79x25, because the nicest and closest font is 10x19 pixels and 480/19 lets you have 25 lines. Annoying. But then why isn't it 80 across ? Good question, some sort of window manager override which I'd need to scan through source code to resolve I guess. I've tried vncviewer to X with xterm -fn 10x20 and that works, but is unusably complex to start. I've also tried starting Xvfb via X forwarding, along with starting a local Xorg :1 against tty2 which just caused massive screen corruption, although I could see it worked with xterm -fn 10x20 -e "stty size ; sleep 5". I'd added 10x20 font with xset +fp /home/user/misc and a copy of the old bitmast misc fonts (xset running remotely rather than native compile, but that makes no difference).

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

I'd used gconftool-2 to view osso-xterm settings weeks ago, which is how I knew how to remove the bottom bar or update which keys are in it. hadI even replied in that thread before starting this one.

Thanks for the link, however this thread is about generally making the terminal much better, not minor workarounds. If you've used s2putty on the 9300/e90/n97 (9300 is slightly different s80 compile), you'd know what I'm used to.

This terminal is /quite/ good but not there yet and I'd like to work out a few niggles to get it more close to perfection.

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

just a thought:
have you considered porting an X Terminal Application that better fits your needs?

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

Ah, yes this is extremely annoying, I don't know how it's not affecting me more, it seems to disappear via ssh -> screen -> irssi from what I can tell. [update] Oh I've mapped the wrong Enter key to do the right thing in vim, so I think I'm just not noticing. Tools like irssi and alpine don't mind the wrong Enter.

This part works. In fact I get correct double wide chars, this and URL matching to spawn windows, are two actual improvements in the terminal app on the n900, I obviously want to keep these ;)

No! It can't be that hard to fix this. I think I'd accept losing the scrolly page up if I can change that part of the code to send a Tab. Shift-Fn-Up scrolls back just like Shift-PgUp in a real Xterm as I've mapped Fn-Up/Down to do PgUp and PgDn.

Again, no! A) I find my nail has great accuracy and that's what I drive the display with normally anyway B) this could be a quick fix. like enabling auto copy and having something like camera button as a paste.

I've updated as much as I can remember. The rest of the fixes are going to have to involve digging in to the code or finding people better than me to help resolve this faster.

Does anyone have any comments about the direction, is everyone else very happy with the terminal?

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

Most of the issues are very Hildon/Maemo/n900 specific. The limited keyboard, the way of having/dealing with fullscreen and gestures for example.

I've X forwarded Xterm, and I can get a nice font and Ctrl-Left click lets me at least select ^H as backspace (I forgot to moan about that above ;)) but that's really not that useful in general without a middle click I can't paste stuff I've highlighted and I can't do loads of the other stuff I've mentioned in this new thread.

Re: Perfecting the terminal application.
 

I can confirm that running xkbset on the device (as in this post) disables the sticky shift key in Maemo apps (like the terminal). Non-Maemo apps, like Debian Roxterm, have all of the sticky keys enabled.