OSXFAQ Mac OS X UNIX Tip-of-the-Day  

Week 99 - Terminal Tricks (21 February 2005)

by Adrian Mayo - Editor, OSXFAQ

Friday - Alternative Terminals

The standard terminal for OS X is Apple's Terminal.app, but there are many other alternatives.

If you have installed X11, you will have xterm. Xterm is started automatically when X11 starts up, and you can type:

to get a new Xterm window. (Remember to add the & otherwise the first terminal will be locked running Xterm as a foreground task.)

Xterm is hugely configurable as witnessed by 'man xterm'

Start new Xterm terminals with Command-N. Select X11 menu Applications::Customise to add new commands to the Applications menu. For example, add:

Name:     xterm
Command:  /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm  -sb -sl 5000 -rightbar -fg white -bg black -geometry 100x50+40+20
Shortcut: n

Now Command-N will start a new Xterm window sized 100 columns by 50 rows, positioned (40,20) pixels from the top left of the screen (-geometry 100x50+40+20).

'-fg white -bg black' sets white text on a black backgound.

'-sb -sl 5000 -rightbar' sets a scroll bar on the right-hand side, and a scroll-back buffer of 5000 lines.

Xeyes is fun, watch the eyes watching your cursor. Set up a customised command as follows:

Name:     eyes
Command:  /usr/X11R6/bin/xman -bothshown -notopbox
Shortcut: whatever-you-want or blank

Xman is useful, a nice front end to the Unix manual. Set up a customised command as follows:

Name:     xman
Command:  /usr/X11R6/bin/xman -bothshown -notopbox
Shortcut: whatever-you-want or blank

iTerm is an alternative terminal.

iTerm

iTerm is a full featured terminal emulation program written for OS X using Cocoa. It supports language encodings, VT100/ANSI/XTERM emulation and many convenient GUI features.

Zterm is useful if you need to talk via a serial or USB port (to configure routers for example).

Zterm

ZTerm is a terminal emulation program for the Macintosh. In its day, many people used it to connect to Bulletin Board Systems and download files. Now we have the internet. Its still a useful utility for those systems that only offer dialup connections and for connecting to devices through a serial port, like many routers. For newer Macs that don't have a normal serial port, ZTerm can talk to ports on USB to serial adapters, through the appropriate driver software supplied with the adapter.

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