[Info-vax] Open source terminal emulators, was: Re: DECnet Phase IV broken after VSI update

[Simon Clubley]

On 2021-10-31, Lawrence D?Oliveiro <lawrencedo99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Monday, November 1, 2021 at 10:52:35 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> Emulators are fine. But we need VT200 emulation and terminal 
>> type set to VT200 (or higher). 
>
> What extra capabilities do you need? All the ones that are worth 
> implementing should already be in the available open-source 
> emulators.

Editing keypad (this is NOT the numeric keypad placed into application
keypad mode, but an extra smaller keypad).

Function keys.

8-bit escape sequence support.

None of these are present in VT100-only terminal emulators.

Also, a good number of years ago, I went through a good range of
Linux-based open source terminal emulators, and many of them were
useless when it came to using them fully with VMS, so I stuck with
PuTTY and xterm (with keyboard remappings) as both of these are
rock solid for me.

Many of the open source terminal emulators I tried only did the display
part of terminal emulation and forgot about the DEC keyboard emulation
part (ie: application keypad mode, function keys, editing keypad).

Some couldn't even display output from VMS-specific programs, such
as EVE, correctly.

Have things improved in recent years or is it still PuTTY and xterm
if you need to use a rock solid Linux based terminal emulator to
connect to VMS and use _all_ of the DEC terminal functionality,
including full DEC keyboard functionality ?

A really good test for me at the time was to try using EDT or EVE
(in EDT mode) with some of these open source emulators and see if they
failed immediately or lasted for as long as 30 seconds before failing.

I also tried using them with emacs configured for EDT keypad mode and
got pretty much the same result when testing DEC keyboard emulation.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.