22 Mar
2017
22 Mar
'17
1:02 a.m.
OK, so I don't have a real VT100, so I'm accessing an old 4.3BSD system
with xterm and LXTerminal terminal emulators on Linux. Last night, for a
laugh, I ran vttest from the 1980s and the terminal emulators performed
woefully.
Which raises the question, are there any _good_ VT100 terminal
emulators, especially for Linux? For any other platforms?
Cheers, Warren
22 Mar
22 Mar
1:10 a.m.
________________________________________
From: cctalk [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] on behalf of Warren Toomey via cctalk
[cctalk at classiccmp.org]
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 9:02 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Any faithful VT100 Emulators?
OK, so I don't have a real VT100, so I'm accessing an old 4.3BSD system
with xterm and LXTerminal terminal emulators on Linux. Last night, for a
laugh, I ran vttest from the 1980s and the terminal emulators performed
woefully.
Which raises the question, are there any _good_ VT100 terminal
emulators, especially for Linux? For any other platforms?
Cheers, Warren
__________________________________________
I've never formally tested it but people say Putty is very good. I have even
heard VMS users say it works with LSE. ANd then, if you have MSDOS
laying around somewhere there is MSKermit which had to be the best I
ever saw.
bill
11:11 a.m.
________________________________________
From: cctalk [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] on behalf of Warren Toomey via cctalk
[cctalk at classiccmp.org]
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 9:02 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Any faithful VT100 Emulators?
OK, so I don't have a real VT100, so I'm accessing an old 4.3BSD system
with xterm and LXTerminal terminal emulators on Linux. Last night, for a
laugh, I ran vttest from the 1980s and the terminal emulators performed
woefully.
Which raises the question, are there any _good_ VT100 terminal
emulators, especially for Linux? For any other platforms?
Cheers, Warren
__________________________________________
I've never formally tested it but people say Putty is very good. I have even
heard VMS users say it works with LSE. ANd then, if you have MSDOS
laying around somewhere there is MSKermit which had to be the best I
ever saw.
bill
I've used Putty to connect to a VMS system to run TPU (which I think LSE is
a thinly disguised variant of) and I have regularly come across an irritating
bug which messes up full screen editing when the on-screen cursor seems to get
out of step with the text that is actually getting changed, or something like
that anyway. Scrolling down the file and scrolling back up to the point where
changes were made reveals that the changes actually made were not what it
looked like was changed on the screen.
Having said that Putty is way better than any of the Microsoft telnet or
Hyperterminal offerings which are completely unusable with TPU or anything else
that attempts to make use of a scrolling region (vi maybe? - I don't know).
I haven't used MSKermit for donkeys years but as far as I recall, the emulation
was very good with the exception of stuff like double height characters and
smooth scroll not being implemented which did not affect functionality in the
way that the Putty bug does. I haven't used it but I think there were very
good reports about the terminal emulation in Kermit 95.
I can't recall noticing any problems with the terminal emulation when using
whatever telnet client comes with relatively current Apple Mac and Linux
systems in whatever terminal environment they provide (xterm maybe?), nor
the Multinet telnet client on VMS when running it in a DECterm or a real VT
terminal.
I also agree with John Wilson's take on VTTEST being well off the mark.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.
1:01 p.m.
On Mar 22, 2017, at 7:11 AM, Peter Coghlan via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
I've used Putty to connect to a VMS system to run TPU (which I think LSE is
a thinly disguised variant of) and I have regularly come across an irritating
bug which messes up full screen editing when the on-screen cursor seems to get
out of step with the text that is actually getting changed, or something like
that anyway. Scrolling down the file and scrolling back up to the point where
changes were made reveals that the changes actually made were not what it
looked like was changed on the screen.
I don't remember how VMS describes terminal types, but here's one possible issue.
VT100 is fairly different from VT101/102, and if the emulator is emulating a VT100 while
the application has been told it has a VT102, things are likely to be problematic. I
vaguely remember that VT100 lacks the insert operations, and if the program tries to use
those when they aren't there, that would certainly cause the sort of problems you
mentioned.
paul
1:20 a.m.
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 11:02:58AM +1000, Warren Toomey via cctalk wrote:
OK, so I don't have a real VT100, so I'm
accessing an old 4.3BSD system
with xterm and LXTerminal terminal emulators on Linux. Last night, for a
laugh, I ran vttest from the 1980s and the terminal emulators performed
woefully.
Which raises the question, are there any _good_ VT100 terminal
emulators, especially for Linux? For any other platforms?
If I do say so myself, the one in E11 is very true. Its VT100, VT101,
and VT102 emulations "fail" VTTEST in exactly the same ways that the real
VT100, VT101, and VT102 do (point is: VTTEST is a fool's paradise, and
anything which 100% passes it is *definitely* not 100% VT100-compatible).
The best E11 flavors for the VT100 emulation are for Windows and OS/2
(those give you pretty much *everything*, including smooth-scroll and blink
and true double-size characters and the correct VT100 font and the SET-UP 0
screen scramble). DOS and stand-alone give you a good text-mode approximation
(minus smooth scroll, and blink isn't quite accurate, and the double-size
characters reassign unused char-gen cells until they run out and then it
starts to look like a ransom note), but the Linux version works only on
text consoles (mainly because I haven't found a linker that builds from
OMF386 .OBJ files yet also handles ELF imports correctly, so I can't build
it against X).
Currently there's no free-standing version (it exists only built into E11),
which I've been meaning to deal with for centuries (and I'm currently --
as in for the past week -- working on a version for XMOS microcontrollers
as part of my "SchmELF" CDP1802 project), but meanwhile if you go here:
www.dbit.com/pub/e11/
... and grab the "vt100.ini" and "vt100.pdp" files, that gives you a
simple
loopback program which makes the E11 VT100 console act as a terminal
connected to whatever's assigned to TT1: (a serial port or "TELCLIENT:"
Telnet client are the most useful -- which currently rules out OS/2 I
guess).
John Wilson
D Bit
5:53 a.m.
Warren Toomey wrote:
are there any _good_ VT100 terminal emulators
This emulates the 8080 and runs off ROMs, if you want that kind of
accuracy:
https://github.com/phooky/VT100-Hax
1:01 p.m.
On 22 March 2017 at 01:02, Warren Toomey via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Which raises the question, are there any _good_ VT100
terminal
emulators, especially for Linux? For any other platforms?
You don't specify open source or commercial, but for windows I used to
constantly use PowerTerm525 at work, it's originally an Ericom product but
DEC bundled it in with the Pathworks client and it did everything I needed
as an old coder who used to write for all the VT1xx AVO features. These
days I use PuTTY which works fine for all my VMS stuff but you also still
have Reflection (pair) and TeraTerm (free).
Even now though I still miss the EDT keypad, muscle memory is a great
thing, having just added this line in I automatically hit KP0 to cursor
down to the next line :)
Linux, no idea. I seem to use lxterm mostly, and minicom for serial
terminal stuff.
Cheers,
--
adrian/witchy
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest home computer collection?
www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk
2616
days inactive
2616
days old
6 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
bill.gunshannon＠hotmail.com -
binarydinosaurs＠gmail.com -
cctalk＠beyondthepale.ie -
lars＠nocrew.org -
paulkoning＠comcast.net -
wilson＠dbit.com -
wkt＠tuhs.org