Xterm For Mac

As all terminal types, xterm is a standard that allows the server to send text to the user's screen. By embedding special controls in the text, these codes allow control over the placement and display charachacteristics (location, color, etc.) of the text, rather than merely displaying text from left to right and top to bottom like an old teletype (TTY).

Xterm For Mac Download
Xterm Display For Mac

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E.g. in order to send the text 'this is an error!' to the user's screen with the word 'error' highlighted, the host would send This is an ^[1m error ^[0m! to the xterm terminal. Rather than displaying all the text, the xterm terminal will interpret ^[1m and ^[0m as commands that tell it to highlight the text that is received between them.

While the above code actually also works in some (but not all) other terminal types, like VT100 or VT220 (xterm controls are actually a superset of these), xterm vastly expands the codes and possibilites over those.

Xterm For Mac Download

Notably, xterm is one of the few terminals, that acknowledges the fact that it lives in an emulator and is not a physical terminal (see terminal emulator) and thus includes codes that manipulate the emulator window itself.

Here is an exceprt from one of the code squences that allow that:

ESC [ n t
n = 13 → Report xterm window position as CSI 3 ; x; yt
n = 14 → Report xterm window in pixels as CSI 4 ; height ; width t
n = 18 → Report the size of the text area in characters as CSI 8 ; height ; width t
n = 19 → Report the size of the screen in characters as CSI 9 ; height ; width t
n = 20 → Report xterm window’s icon label as OSC L label ST
n = 21 → Report xterm window’s title as OSC l title ST
(ESC equals character hex 1B or ^[ )

Another improvement in the xterm terminal emulation is the strict definition of function keys and the codes sent by the terminal, especially in combination with combinations of keyboard modifier keys like shift, alt, ctrl.

A fulll list of terminal emulation sequences for xterm can be found on xfree86.org.

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Synopsis

The xterm program is a terminal emulator for the X Window System. It provides DEC VT102 and Tektronix 4014 compatible terminals for programs that can't use the window system directly.

This version implements ISO/ANSI colors using the 'new' color model (i.e., background color erase). It also implements most of the control sequences for VT220, as well as selected features from other DEC terminals such as VT320, VT420 and VT520.

History

I decided to work on xterm in early 1995, to support ded and add (and incidentally ncurses) in the X environment. Several people had made modifications to xterm to support color, but none (except for the completely independent rxvt) implemented background color erase. That is rather like preferring MS-DOS to UNIX. Completely mystifying.

Being bogged down in ncurses, I didn't get involved in xterm until the very end of 1995, after working on atac.

I implemented a workable version of colorized xterm just at the point where XFree86 3.1.2B was announced, complete with a color xterm. As luck would have it, they'd incorporated the 'old' color model. So I joined the XFree86 project to fix it.

As I learned more about xterm, I realized that it implemented part of VT220 (i.e., the locking shifts for extended character sets). Since a number of people on the Internet are looking for a good VT220 emulator, it seemed a natural follow-on project to make xterm a good VT220 emulator. By the release of XFree86 3.2, I had implemented most of the control sequences, except for a handful (DECSTR, the KAM and SRM modes, the ones pertaining to doublesize and soft characters, and of course, blink).

XTerm FAQ

The XTerm FAQ gives more information, showing how to resolve problems with it, as well as contrasting xterm with other terminals.

Xterm Display For Mac

XTerm Change Log

The CHANGE LOG shows when and why features were added or changed.