#xterm — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #xterm, aggregated by home.social.
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And this is how we do our computing at work now.. on #openbsd in #ratpoison #xterm #emacs
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The terminal line discipline has very little to do with it, as full-screen programs like VIM put the line discipline into non-canonical mode, where there are no special characters.
Where this issue lies, and has done since the 1980s, is emulating a DEC VT.
On an actual DEC VT the Backspace key is programmatically switchable between DEL and BS. #XTerm extended this years ago and makes the two Delete keys switchable between DEL and DECFNK 3.
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The terminal line discipline has very little to do with it, as full-screen programs like VIM put the line discipline into non-canonical mode, where there are no special characters.
Where this issue lies, and has done since the 1980s, is emulating a DEC VT.
On an actual DEC VT the Backspace key is programmatically switchable between DEL and BS. #XTerm extended this years ago and makes the two Delete keys switchable between DEL and DECFNK 3.
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The terminal line discipline has very little to do with it, as full-screen programs like VIM put the line discipline into non-canonical mode, where there are no special characters.
Where this issue lies, and has done since the 1980s, is emulating a DEC VT.
On an actual DEC VT the Backspace key is programmatically switchable between DEL and BS. #XTerm extended this years ago and makes the two Delete keys switchable between DEL and DECFNK 3.
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The terminal line discipline has very little to do with it, as full-screen programs like VIM put the line discipline into non-canonical mode, where there are no special characters.
Where this issue lies, and has done since the 1980s, is emulating a DEC VT.
On an actual DEC VT the Backspace key is programmatically switchable between DEL and BS. #XTerm extended this years ago and makes the two Delete keys switchable between DEL and DECFNK 3.
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The terminal line discipline has very little to do with it, as full-screen programs like VIM put the line discipline into non-canonical mode, where there are no special characters.
Where this issue lies, and has done since the 1980s, is emulating a DEC VT.
On an actual DEC VT the Backspace key is programmatically switchable between DEL and BS. #XTerm extended this years ago and makes the two Delete keys switchable between DEL and DECFNK 3.
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OK, WTF is going on with #xfce #terminal ?
I've been noticing a lot of files with blank names showing up recently. None of the usual tricks to find "blank named files" worked.
But when I do
ls -li
to show the inode number and then
find . -inum <inode number>
I see that there IS a filename. Buh?
So I opened up #xterm and looked at the same thing. No, the files *do* have names. XFCE IS HIDING THEM
Hiding them how? Well, I can highlight the text and it seems to be a foreground character there. What is it?
If I paste that highlight into an editor, the text is visible.
What the actual fuck?
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Geekery: #linux #debian #X11 #xterm
In 2025 I switched back to original xterm.
I had previously been using alacritty for several years, after a period of looking for a term-em that actually did all the things I wanted and wasn't too much of a pain in configuration or RAM use.
And before that I used rxvt (or urxvt) for about two decades.
Why did I switch this time? Because I did a quick review of about 40 term-ems in the course of a week, and was utterly astonished to find that xterm had acquired all the features that I actually wanted to use.
In the same way that I care about the fuel-efficiency of a car more than whether it's nominally a standard motor or a non-plugin-hybrid, I don't care about whether or not the term-em takes advantage of the graphics coprocessor to do the job. Do letters show up real fast? Great, I don't care how they got there.
But I want to be able to specify the fonts that I like, not have strange boxes show up when someone writes their name in a non-roman character set, use a bunch of colors, not show me the scrollbar but always have scrolling available, and not have weird bugs.
Since xterm is the only term-em I can approximately guarantee everything has been tested against, a bug that shows up as a result of using a particular term-em is least likely to manifest with xterm. Pragmatics.
I would like to extend kudos to the authors of Terminology, a term-em which, on first run, pops up a slider and asks you to adjust it until the font size is comfortable. That's worthy of a Galactic Prize for Extremely Obvious Cleverness.
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New Year's Redactions
My earlier text redaction demos were done in my OpenGL setup, using a pixelation effect overlaid on a text document. This was rather simple, but it required some manual tweaking to align the pixelation grid with the text. I've now redone the effect in text mode using Python, and besides unifying the text and "graphics" more cleanly, it makes certain extra features easier, such as this incremental redaction. Of course, video sources as used in the previous post also work.
A particular feature of the unified text + graphics process is that redactions won't exceed the length of each line. In the OpenGL version, the draw area had to be limited to the text rectangle manually, but now it works as it should have done all along.
#2026 #trumpmemes #epsteinmemes #jeffreyepstein #epsteinfiles #halftoneart #raster #pixelart #textmode #textmodeart #oldskool #xterm #pythoncode #algorithmicart #algorist
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@nuintari Oh, 100% agreed — I'm also using xterm for some administrative tasks, like manipulations with jails or bhyve VMs, or simply updating the system. It just works and eats only 20 MB of RAM and 0.03 % of CPU, lol.
BTW, during my presentation about X11, I received some commentary about xterm is the "slow terminal". How do "all cool kids in the school" measures speed of the terminal now?
I tried to type dmesg and all output scrolled to the end almost instantly🤷
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Tiny note-to-self blog:
How I made #unicode work between my #slackware laptop and my #openbsd server.
Also featuring guest appearances by #xterm and #emacs.
https://www.kindness.city/blog/2025-12-18-making-unicode-work.html
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Came to read about gaming on #FreeBSD in the @vermaden blog, but fell through the links and now I'm changing fonts and installing xlock, lol :drgn_happy_blep:
BTW., IBM Plex Mono for #Emacs and #xterm is nice
(1st screenshot — before, with DejaVu Sans Mono and DejaVu Serif. 2nd screenshot — after, with IBM Plex Mono and Trebuchet MS).
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Came to read about gaming on #FreeBSD in the @vermaden blog, but fell through the links and now I'm changing fonts and installing xlock, lol :drgn_happy_blep:
BTW., IBM Plex Mono for #Emacs and #xterm is nice
(1st screenshot — before, with DejaVu Sans Mono and DejaVu Serif. 2nd screenshot — after, with IBM Plex Mono and Trebuchet MS).
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Came to read about gaming on #FreeBSD in the @vermaden blog, but fell through the links and now I'm changing fonts and installing xlock, lol :drgn_happy_blep:
BTW., IBM Plex Mono for #Emacs and #xterm is nice
(1st screenshot — before, with DejaVu Sans Mono and DejaVu Serif. 2nd screenshot — after, with IBM Plex Mono and Trebuchet MS).
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Came to read about gaming on #FreeBSD in the @vermaden blog, but fell through the links and now I'm changing fonts and installing xlock, lol :drgn_happy_blep:
BTW., IBM Plex Mono for #Emacs and #xterm is nice
(1st screenshot — before, with DejaVu Sans Mono and DejaVu Serif. 2nd screenshot — after, with IBM Plex Mono and Trebuchet MS).
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Came to read about gaming on #FreeBSD in the @vermaden blog, but fell through the links and now I'm changing fonts and installing xlock, lol :drgn_happy_blep:
BTW., IBM Plex Mono for #Emacs and #xterm is nice
(1st screenshot — before, with DejaVu Sans Mono and DejaVu Serif. 2nd screenshot — after, with IBM Plex Mono and Trebuchet MS).
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Rule/Yule 30 cellular automaton with a "band-pass" filter every few iterations. Done in the Bash shell using bitwise math, so each row/state is a single number of 63 bits.
#cellularautomata #cellularautomaton #rule30 #bitwiseoperators #textmode #textmodeart #oldskool #retrocomputing #unixshell #shellprogramming #xterm #joulu6 #xmastree #algorithmicart #algorist #mathart #laskutaide #ittaide #kuavataide #iterati
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Rule/Yule 30 cellular automaton with a "band-pass" filter every few iterations. Done in the Bash shell using bitwise math, so each row/state is a single number of 63 bits.
#cellularautomata #cellularautomaton #rule30 #bitwiseoperators #textmode #textmodeart #oldskool #retrocomputing #unixshell #shellprogramming #xterm #joulu6 #xmastree #algorithmicart #algorist #mathart #laskutaide #ittaide #kuavataide #iterati
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Rule/Yule 30 cellular automaton with a "band-pass" filter every few iterations. Done in the Bash shell using bitwise math, so each row/state is a single number of 63 bits.
#cellularautomata #cellularautomaton #rule30 #bitwiseoperators #textmode #textmodeart #oldskool #retrocomputing #unixshell #shellprogramming #xterm #joulu6 #xmastree #algorithmicart #algorist #mathart #laskutaide #ittaide #kuavataide #iterati
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Rule/Yule 30 cellular automaton with a "band-pass" filter every few iterations. Done in the Bash shell using bitwise math, so each row/state is a single number of 63 bits.
#cellularautomata #cellularautomaton #rule30 #bitwiseoperators #textmode #textmodeart #oldskool #retrocomputing #unixshell #shellprogramming #xterm #joulu6 #xmastree #algorithmicart #algorist #mathart #laskutaide #ittaide #kuavataide #iterati
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Rule/Yule 30 cellular automaton with a "band-pass" filter every few iterations. Done in the Bash shell using bitwise math, so each row/state is a single number of 63 bits.
#cellularautomata #cellularautomaton #rule30 #bitwiseoperators #textmode #textmodeart #oldskool #retrocomputing #unixshell #shellprogramming #xterm #joulu6 #xmastree #algorithmicart #algorist #mathart #laskutaide #ittaide #kuavataide #iterati
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🚀 Wow, let's compare outdated screenshots from 2002 with slightly less outdated ones from 2015! The riveting tale of #xterm windows and non-existent design updates, because who doesn't love staring at 13-year-old tech nostalgia? 📷✨ Spoiler: Still boring.
https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-2015/ #technostalgia #outdateddesign #windows2015 #throwback #HackerNews #ngated -
Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility
https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web
#HackerNews #Ghostty #WASM #xterm.js #API #compatibility #web #development
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https://gist.github.com/sjaturner/787e94646949e266109f264d0e370893
#linux #x11 #graphics #xterm #commandline
At work, I ssh to remote machines and use tmux. Debian Trixie now has Sixel support enabled in tmux, so you can have graphics in the terminal 😃
It's often useful to have a quick look at some data without copying it elsewhere - or relying on X11 graphics.
There are lots more possibilities with img2sixel, of course.
The Gist shows how to set things up for Octave plotting in an Xterm. A lot of more modern terminals support Sixel, too.
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For the first time in ages I opened #Facebook and got a reminder from 14 years ago. It in #Icelandic but I will translate it for you to #English
"Got a comment at #work today from a co-worker when he saw my #VNC session opened with 4x #xterm windows within.
Have you thought that you might be too much of a #nerd?
I am so #happy with my #LifeChoices ! That much is sure!"
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I wrote a very geeky thing. I know, you are surprised.
The folks at lobste.rs taunted me into writing up quick reviews of a bunch of terminal emulators. Yes, like xterm. Yes, more than 30 of them.
https://blog.randomstring.org/2025/09/26/a-comparison-of-terminal-emulators/
#x11 #macos #terminals #xterm #linux #bsd #terminal-hashtag-exhaustion
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I've had this idea of having a ruler in the terminal. Such a ruler would allow me to see how far across the terminal a character or word is.
Why? Not sure yet, I just liked the idea of it. You know, this is one of those solutions looking for a problem. ;). Still, it was fun.
What I came up was this:
(ruler1.png)
This is achieved using tmux, where it's possible to create a split where the output is taken from stdin (rather than spawning a shell):
% ruler | tmux splitw -dI -l2 -b &
Here, this creates a split window two lines high (-l2), puts on the top (-b), and puts the output from the`ruler` command in the window.
Then I can use text using whatever against the ruler to see where on the screen it is.
We can take this a step further though and make use of tmux's `popup-display` command to have a ruler floating on the screen:
(ruler2.png)
... and even make it borderless:
(ruler3.png)
This can be moved using the mouse, by holding Alt down and dragging with mouse-1.
It turns out that using a ruler in an application isn't new.
Thomas Dickey (of #xterm fame) wrote #ded (https://invisible-island.net/ded/ded.html) which has a ruler on it:
(ruler4.png)
#ded is an interesting program of itself and I had to tweak it slightly to make ot use ncursesw to display nicely in tmux (ACS fallback for drawing the ruler), which I might discuss in a separate thread on here.
I'll have to email Thomas to find out what the "workspace ruler" (as it's called) does, and what it's useful for.
As for my ruler, well, I think I have the measure of it now, so I think I'll re-write the quick shell script into something with bells-and-whistles.
Maybe I'll give it conversion options to display inches, feet, cubits, etc... ;)
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Me adelanto al #viernesdeescritorio pq sino se me olvida...
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Sí ya sé, no es viernes...
#viernesdeescritorio
#desktopfriday
#twm
#xterm
#openbsd76 -
Funny and interesting talk. Sure as hell i was waiting whether the most loathed, scoffed at, tutted at („No gpu acceleration? How antiquated!“) terminal emulator was among those who can be tricked into executing arbitrary remote commands using #ansi escape code fuckery.
yes #xterm and no, apparently it can not. #terminal #shell #security #Defcon31 #defcon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T2Al3jdY38
https://www.yewtu.be/watch?v=3T2Al3jdY38 -
As many of you know, I'm a huge fan of xterm.
It seems that as of last year, xterm now has it's own website:
It's really cool! Lots of useful tips on there.
Worth a read. :)
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Yeah! #Asciismuggler attack dropped and I checked: my branch of #beanshell - https://codeberg.org/elbosso/beanshell for #java as well as #sQLshell are not vulnerable against it (as well as #neovim in #xterm - but that is a different story...) - details will follow on my website.
The attack: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/hiding-and-finding-text-with-unicode-tags/ -
I guess this was it I can no longer use kitty, after the lastest version kitty is explicity requiring sRGB color encoding. My poor old video card doesn't have sRGB support, I'm fairly certain even before this change the colors was displayed incorrectly. Not that I cared that much about sRGB ever.
It's just another thing that I can't use in this old system, at least I have xterm that I used as a backup terminal emulator up until now that was also a requirement to have for my window manager xmonad.
Not that I don't like to xterm but I really liked kitty, plus it was the only GPU accelerated terminal emulator that I was able to use. -
Vera Rubin at Mayall Telescope
Deidre Hunter (left), Katy Garmany (center), and Vera Rubin (right) at the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope around 2000.
Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
https://noirlab.edu/public/images/VeraRubin_DeidreHunter_KatyGarmany-CC/#VeraRubin #Astronomer #Astronomy #Rubin #DeidreHunter #KatyGarmany #science #STEM #WomeninSTEM #WomeninScience #Astrodon #KittPeak #Arizona #Xterminal #Xterminals #xterm
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Monitor recommendations?
current 42" curved TV/monitor is fritzing, gonna open it up in a few min, I like the 4096x2160 screen real estate
if it's not reliable, then I need to replace it :(
not a gamer, so looking for good xterm text readability, firefox, and video replay support on debian
OLED is no longer 3x pricing. Is it worth the current premium?
Do I want to care about FreeSync for video playback and conf calls?
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Encountered the strangest bug using combination of xterm + tmux + vimwiki. The `VimWikiGoBackLink` function using the backspace key is not working. It simply behaves as a backspace key.
*However* it acts like that only locally. If I ssh into the machine, start tmux, then start Vimwiki it *does* work as expected.
Open xterm and start Vimwiki (no tmux) it works as expected.
It also works in other terminals (urxvt, lxterminal).
I'm at a loss how to fix this.
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@WinstonSmith: #XMMS2 is still in #Debian, just currently not in #DebianTesting, but in #Debian11 aka the current #DebianStable as well as in #DebianUnstable: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xmms2
(Or doesn't XMMS2 have that #WinAmp UI anymore? Can't remember as I no more use #GUI music players anymore for quite some years. I just use an #xterm and the #CLI #mediaplayer #mpv. Also works for many video streaming portals.)
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@dani Haha 😎
I'm running a (heavily configured) #fvwm3 here. This screenshot was just for demonstration that #dos2ansi and #showansi don't depend on any configuration, so this was a completely unconfigured X session in #Xephyr, which by default runs #twm.
You can even see the test mode in #xterm can only use 8 colors (because this is what the default xterm #terminfo entry announces), still the #xterm windows launched by #showansi have full color support, they explicitly set the terminal name to "xterm-256colors".
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And now there's even #dos2ansi v1.6.2: https://github.com/Zirias/dos2ansi/releases/tag/v1.6.2
The good thing is: The issues I'm fixing here are getting more and more obscure 😂
First I noticed #xterm doesn't accept all #utf8 for its '-title' option, no matter what. But it *does* support the escape sequence to set a title, so, why not use this instead.
Having added support for that (and also optionally for setting the window size using an escape sequence), I had a look at quoting again. Indeed, #showansi failed for e.g. file names containing #shell special characters.
Therefore added a *safe* quote function. The downside is, it requires #sed now. Well ....
Screenshot shows both improvements, I picked a "maximum weird" file name and used a file that has an 'ö' in its title 🥳 -- in the showansi debugging output, you can see the quoting in action 🤯
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Playing around some more with some *very* old #ANSIart files ... blinking was obviously used more back then, and it's really nice #xterm can actually do that! 😎
(need to pass an extra -k flag to #dos2ansi here because there's no #SAUCE in this old file and the default is assuming bright colors instead)
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BTW, the color difference you see in these Windows screenshots is the classic "dark yellow vs brown" issue.
Quick background, with digital #RGBI signals (like used with #CGA), you couldn't have brown, but high-quality monitors (including IBM's own, but also a Commodore 1084 I have here) had extra circuitry adjusting dark yellow to brown by reducing the green component. With #CGA on a cheap monitor or a TV set, you still had "dark yellow".
#VGA finally moved to analog #RGB and used brown. Still many terminals today (including #Windows #Console) have dark yellow in their default palettes.
#dos2ansi must rely on the default palette when the terminal supports only 8 or 16 colors, but with a 256-color terminal, it uses "original" CGA/VGA colors. And of course, there's a switch to disable the "brown adjustment" 😎
Screenshot from #xterm on#FreeBSD showing both modes, actually this example looks like it might have been designed with "dark yellow" in mind.
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#FreeBSD users can get a #port of #dos2ansi v1.4 here, patch applies to the ports tree with `git am` (hint, use a local git branch to avoid cluttering your `main`):
https://people.freebsd.org/~zirias/patches/0001-textproc-dos2ansi-Add-new-port.patchThe port comes in two flavors: "nox11" makes #showansi optional and doesn't add any dependencies. "x11" (the default flavor) always includes showansi and adds runtime dependencies to #xterm and #ibmfonts, so the default configuration of showansi works out of the box.
Still unsure whether I should add it to the official ports tree .... 🤔
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Yeah! #Asciismuggler attack dropped and I checked: my branch of #beanshell - https://codeberg.org/elbosso/beanshell for #java as well as #sQLshell are not vulnerable against it (as well as #neovim in #xterm - but that is a different story...) - details will follow on my website.
The attack: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/hiding-and-finding-text-with-unicode-tags/ -
Yeah! #Asciismuggler attack dropped and I checked: my branch of #beanshell - https://codeberg.org/elbosso/beanshell for #java as well as #sQLshell are not vulnerable against it (as well as #neovim in #xterm - but that is a different story...) - details will follow on my website.
The attack: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/hiding-and-finding-text-with-unicode-tags/ -
Yeah! #Asciismuggler attack dropped and I checked: my branch of #beanshell - https://codeberg.org/elbosso/beanshell for #java as well as #sQLshell are not vulnerable against it (as well as #neovim in #xterm - but that is a different story...) - details will follow on my website.
The attack: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/hiding-and-finding-text-with-unicode-tags/ -
It has taken me some time to diagnose, but with the help of #strace I now know that ffmpeg is blocked on writing its progress report to the terminal.
Switching to the terminal unblocks the process and things continue.
Plain old #xterm does not have this problem, but #gnome Terminal does. Looking over the issues I do not see something similar, but I would have expected that more people would see such a problem?
I am on Debian Trixie by the way, so I am using Gnome Terminal 3.51.90.
2/2
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Sí ya sé, no es viernes...
#viernesdeescritorio
#desktopfriday
#twm
#xterm
#openbsd76
