TERM for filepro

[Brian K. White]

On 9/27/2011 6:02 PM, Henry Arredondo wrote:
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: filepro-list-bounces+hxarredondo=lkqcorp.com at lists.celestial.com [mailto:filepro-list-bounces+hxarredondo=lkqcorp.com at lists.celestial.com] On Behalf Of Fairlight
> Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 4:15 PM
> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: Re: TERM for filepro
>
> Y'all catch dis heeyah?  Jay Ashworth been jivin' 'bout like:
>> There's a version of Putty for Linux, but in general, you don't *need* a
>> terminal emulator for Linux workstations, you're already *talking to* Linux
>> through a terminal emulator.  You just SSH over to the machine with the
>> binaries, and run them, from whatever you're already running, konsole, rxvt
>> or what have you.
>
> I never understood it, either...
>
> m->
> --
> Audio panton, cogito singularis.
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> The thing I like about Putty is that it let's you do copy-paste on the fly by selecting the range and clicking the right mouse button to paste. I wonder if there's a terminal emulator within Linux that would do that besides putty.

Are you kidding me? You don't need an emulator for cut & paste. Every 
terminal (be it an emulator or not) already does that perfectly natively.

There are a few plausible reasons to use any emulator when you don't 
need one and it's just another unnecessary 
layer/point-of-falure/complication/crap-you-have-to-keep-track-of/problemo-bfuscator-if-not-causer... 
but cut & paste sure isn't one.

There are numerous, numerous xterm-alikes by now. Practically countless. 
There are reasons to go try 50 of them and fall in love with some 
unusual feature of one, and there are reasons to specifically avoid 
doing any of that because the hot new killer terminal today is next 
months derelict project that no one works on and goes obsolete and 
you're tied to it so your stuck with whatever problems it ends up 
having. Tabbed sessions, built-in zmodem and/or kermit, clickable url's, 
multi-language, saved session managers, etc...

I would only use putty on linux for 3 reasons

* The ability to save all session settings in a portable (also cgi 
generatable) config file.
* emulating sco ansi on the client side if I supported a lot of random 
sco boxes where it would be impractical to properly install 
linux/xorg-xterm termcap, terminfo, and profile stty settings on all the 
sco boxes.
* ultra consistency, "the same app, putty, everywhere, all clients, all 
os's"

The first is hardly necessary unless you had end-users using linux 
desktops, and even then there are session saving regular xterm-alikes 
anyways, or just plain putting a command line full of options into a 
shell script. The second hasn't been true for me since several years 
ago. The third is only partially possible since even on those platforms 
putty supports, it varies somewhat in the details for each platform, so, 
hardly enough consistency to be of any value.

I see really only the very rarest reason to run any emulator, putty or 
other, on a linux desktop. The reason you run an emulator on a windows 
desktop is because windows isn't X and has no "x terminal" or any other 
form of unix-like (streaming mode) terminal, and so you need to emulate 
one. a cmd prompt is not like a unix tty even if it sort of looks like  it.

On linux, both your regular console screen or xterm-alike in X are 
already, natively, perfect tty terminals and are already natively 
exactly the correct tool for connecting to any other remote unix-like 
server.

Apple is as usual a weird case. It technically has a native terminal and 
should in theory be like linux or freebsd or any other unix and require 
no emulator for talking to other boxes, but they pretty much bastardized 
it and screwed it up and so you're best off actually using an emulator 
on Mac the same as you would on Windows.

-- 
bkw