[Info-vax] Last Call for (New) DEC VT Terminals

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-06-27 16:19:49 +0000, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk said:
> I think CDE's open source these days. Does it include a terminal 
> emulator worth looking at?

The xterm implementation is one of the better.  There's a vttest tool 
available for those that are interested in trying out the emulations.

> Anyone know what the licencing status of DECterm is these days?

Beyond closed-source and comparatively outdated?

> FredK was going to start looking at a proper trustworthy terminal 
> emulator several years ago [1] but I can't remember whether it got 
> anywhere.

It did not.

> I can't recall any similar terminal emulator discussions in the 
> intervening period but my memory is not 100% and nor are the search 
> engines.

Lack of UTF-8 support was certainly discussed, various problems with 
PuTTY and the OS X Terminal.app were discussed, likely some other 
topics.

> Fonts are probably as important as source code too, and may have (or 
> require) a separate licence.

There are fonts available now with comparatively permissive licenses.   
Inconsolata, Cooper Hewitt, Source Sans Pro and Anonymous Pro come to 
mind here, though check the associated licenses for details.

> What development and runtime environments does VTstar (the Multia 
> terminal emulator, which eventually was distributed with the VMS 
> freeware?) need? What's its licence these days?

The development environment matters much less than the code.   AFAIK, 
the VTstar source code was not released.  Whether anyone might be able 
to get the Z-Axis folks (Boundless) and the HP folks to make the code 
available?  VSI probably has rights to the same basic VT code as VTstar 
via DECwindows and DECterm, but probably not to open-source the code.

> Ditto its fonts.

The VT fonts are like the PDP-11: both probably look vastly better in 
the rear-view mirror than in our future,  at least for most of us.



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