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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/1/2021 3:21 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.

The "killer test" for terminal emulators is stuff like soft font.

Most don't do them at all.

But OK - I do not consider that a critical feature.

8 bit support is a critical feature.

Arne