Our desktops at Amazon still run piddly old RHEL3. Funny state of affairs that is. Given that RHEL3 is the archaeological coeval of Redhat 9, yes Redhat 9 indeed, that would place it at Circa 2002 in the linux timeline. Anyway, bottomline, RHEL3 is a dinosaur by today's standards.
So given that I spend most of my work life staring at a full screen terminal emulator, settling upon a good one has been a fight given the resources at my disposal. Upgrading stuff is and was always hard given that RHEL3 is on a 2.4 kernel with ancient versions of glibc, gtk and so on.
Anyway, at various points over the past 3 years I've used xterm, aterm and gnome-terminal with mixed feelings for each of them. xterm is mostly crappy and I've got not much to say about it. Aterm is an excellent and superfast terminal but I couldn't get truetype fonts to work on it and hence had to use it with bitmap fonts. And I guess, I am not geek enough to use bitmapped fonts. But anyway, aterm is what I've stuck with mostly given that speed was more important than looks. And gnome-terminal was necessary whenever there was chinese or japanese to be looked at. The default configuration has full utf-8 encoding and font support in addition to being rather pretty with proper true type and all. But then again, the gnome-terminal on rhel3 was too slow for me.
Finally today, I got myself rxvt-unicode (urxvt) and the dejavu font pack and finally have a fast and pretty terminal emulator that I no longer can complain about.
The dejavu fonts are derived from the bitstream vera family of fonts and are developed in a free-software fashion. They're such a big hit in the free-software world that this set of fonts is readily available on a bunch of distributions and is the default set of fonts on ubuntu.
No comments:
Post a Comment