[luau] xterm background in icewm

Ray Strode halfline at hawaii.rr.com
Tue Jun 4 15:36:00 PDT 2002


> Don't know the answer, but I use ICE and prefer the "Gnome Terminal"
GNOME Terminal is a nice terminal program, and it has more of the type
of features that most users would appreciate than xterm, and so I can
understand why you would prefer it, but as others have stated it does
use more memory than xterm.  The reason for this is because it is linked
with gnome-libs.  The way shared libraries work, is the first program
that uses a shared library will load it into memory.  Then any other
programs that use that same library will use the copy of the library
that is already loaded rather than loading a new copy.  This means if
GNOME is started (or any gnome program is running) then gnome-terminal
will use very little additional memory.  Most of that memory (as you
said) will go to the scrollback buffer.  If no other gnome programs are
running, then GNOME Terminal will have to load gnome-libs which will
make it load slower than other terminal programs on slower machines.

I think a common misconception about xterm though, is that it is a
leaner than the others.  xterm has _a lot_ of features.  Much, much more
than any other terminal emulator out there.  It also has been actively
developed much longer than the other projects.  Next time you are
running xterm try holding down the control-key and pressing any of your
three mouse buttons (they all have different menus).  xterm is the only
terminal emulator that does nearly perfect vt100, vt102, vt220, and
vt320 emulation.  It even supports tektronic graphics!  Currently there
are some patches floating around to provide better emulation for
gnome-terminal, but they haven't been added to CVS yet.  Of course, most
people don't need perfect emulation or tektronic graphics or media copy
print controller support or any of the other weird things that xterm
provides, but a lot of people do prefer the modern widget set, and
preference dialogs and other nice things about other terminals.  So to
me there is no clear better term.  Just different ones.  

As a side note though, gnome-libs isn't as bloated as many people make
it out to be and the difference between gnome-terminal and xterm is
going to be pretty small.  For people who /really/ care about memory
footprint, they should look into rxvt, which took the xterm code base
and removed most of the features that 95% of people will never use. (but
also lacks some of the features that 95% of people like from other
terms).

--Ray  




More information about the LUAU mailing list