Re: Terminal emulator capable of emulating Sun terminals

[Thomas Dickey <dickey at his dot com>]

On Fri, 28 May 2004, Chris Green wrote:

> On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 06:53:51AM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 May 2004, Chris Green wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 11:20:57AM +0200, Ariel Burbaickij wrote:
> > > I suppose what I'm suggesting is that you run cygwin/X and use xdm to
> > > display your Sun desktop on your PC, then you can have Sun terminals
> > > as you want.
> >
> > dtterm will display remotely - I don't recall if sun-cmd will (some of
> > those clients don't).
> >
> How would they know?

The terminology doesn't come to mind: something to the effect that
some of the older Sun clients only run in the frame buffer.  (There
are other issues with some other features - there are fonts that don't
display remotely because they're Sun-proprietary and encrypted in some
way).  Just because it's on the workstation's X display doesn't mean
it's usable from a remote workstation.

> Certainly all the Sun terminals work here where I'm displaying my SUn
> desktop on a PC using xdm.

> Yes, I realised that, but what I said is where rxvt 'came from' as it
> were.

Where it 'came from' is more than that - it discarded all of Xt (the
resource mechanism).  Originally all of rxvt's optional features were
hardcoded - compile-time-only.  It has some ability to read resource files
(which is not really interpreting the patterns compatibly with Xt), but
that came a few years later.

Omitting Xt is the major part of reducing size (but most of that is shared
memory).  Also since it doesn't use Xt, some of the ways it manipulates
the graphics are done differently (sometimes a good thing, sometimes now).

The comment in rxvt's manpage about Tektronix emulation has been obsolete
for several years (see xterm's changelog to note when I made it optional).

> > > What do you need sun-cmd or dtterm for?
> >
> > it's probably what he's using right now.
> >
> He said ne *needed* them for some things.  I use a sun-cmd for one

yes, but most people who say they *need* a particular terminal type
don't know enough about the topic to say exactly why.

> particular ancient application which is more functional (and needs
> fewer keystrokes to do some things) in a sun-cmd window than an xterm.

I seem to recall that some of Sun's installs hardcoded "sun" into the
$TERM value (that's recent - gripes about Solaris 9).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net