ROXTerm

[Tom Metro]

Dan Ritter wrote:
> serial, telnet, rsh, secure telnet, ssh... it's useful to have a
> terminal emulator which is not integrated with the underlying
> transport. 

Of course, and I agree, but...

Bill Bogstad wrote:
> The 'right' way to accomplish this would probably be to add some kind
> of plugin system to a Xterm or equivalent program to replace the
> current 'allocate a pty pair and start a command' code.

Exactly.

The protocol-agnostic approach is the right general solution, if you can 
only have one form of xterm. A power user can always add the automation 
themselves (and I have).

My complaint is that I'd rather not have to spend the time on it, 
especially if my use case is the most common one of using an emulator to 
connect to a remote host via ssh.

Lots of traditional command line tools have been GUIfied to make the 
Linux desktop environment more friendly for non-power users, and it just 
seems to me like ssh has been overlooked.


> In the meantime, you might look into Putty.
> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
> it claims to have a Unix version, but I've never tried it myself...

That's true:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#faq-unix

Back when I was looking into xterms I didn't have ssh control in mind as 
a requirement, so it didn't make sense to go for a product that was 
rarely used on Linux.

I see it is available as a package for Ubuntu, and it does integrate ssh 
(and telnet, etc.) into it's UI, and even picked up on an existing 
OpenSSH key when logging in to a host. But the UI of the terminal itself 
is really bare bones (no menu; not even a context menu), with a pretty 
ugly default setup.

At this point I've tuned and automated ROXTerm, so the ssh control isn't 
  a compelling reason to switch - certainly not if it comes at the 
expense of other capabilities.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/