Terminal Emulators

Our inaugural show is all about terminal emulators, that window into the heart of the machine. Along the way we talk about X Windows and the variety of alternative window managers.

Intro song: Czarface and MF Doom “Bomb Thrown”

Terminal Emulators:

• Mo’s Terminal Emulator breakdown
• The VT100 Terminal
• GNOME Terminal
• macOS Terminal.app
• kitty (not to be confused with the PuTTY fork)
• rxvt
• urxvt
• Alacritty
• tmux
• GNU Screen

Latency:

• Dan Luu’s article on terminal latency
• Dan Luu’s article on keyboard latency
• Mac Plus vs. 2007 AMD Dual-Core
• Doherty threshold

X Windows/Wayland:

• X Windows core protocol
• Wayland
• Ex11 - the Erlang implementation (PDF)
• Xrdb

Window Managers

• ratpoison
• dwm
• twm

Other items brought up on the show

• Calibre
• w3m
• Using framebuffers for console access
• SVGALib
• Coding Horror - “Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive”
• suckless software
• nord color theme
• Solarized color theme

Errata

• David mentioned the replacement for XLib and couldn’t recall the name. The name of the replacement library with “the cat logo” is XCB
• The “Chaos protocol” mentioned was Chaosnet, which was written before Project Athena started.
• The “CNC” in a CNC mill stands for Computer Numerical Control
• OpenBSD has now removed root access from X11.
• Rust was mentioned as working with GCC, before David realized he meant Go. It turns out there was a brief effort to get Rust working on GCC
• Multi-pointer X appears to have been merged in 2009
• The browser that worked with SVGAlib that David couldn’t recall the name of was Links