OT? VDQ Terminal emulators under FC6

[Evan Klitzke]

On Sun, 2007-01-28 at 17:05 +0000, Beartooth wrote:
> On another list, one poster made a marginal enthusiastic remark, saying 
> 
> > I love the new 256-color + transparency support for xterm, it works great
> > in Fedora Core 6 using mrxvt.
> 
> Very Dumb Question : is there somewhere I can get a rundown on the
> differing virtues of whatever-all terminal emulators are available?

Not that I know of. But this was correct as of ~6 months ago when I last
looked into it.

256 colors: xterm-256 and gnome-terminal
88 colors: rxvt (probably also eterm, konsole, and others)
16 colors: pretty much everything else

The 256 color support in gnome-terminal is actually provided by libvte,
so anything that takes advantage of that will also get 256 colors. This
is very, very useful for vim, because it gives you the same range of
colors as you would get in gvim. Actually, during the time when only
xterm had 256 colors (and libvte did not), I switched my terminal to
xterm just for this reason.

The other features like transparency and what not are pretty standard
and don't make a big difference. The exception here is that if you are
using a compositing window manager, gnome-terminal will support _real_
transparency. This means that if you turn on transparency in the
terminal, the background of the terminal will become semi-transparent so
you can see the windows and other things behind it, but the window
border and the text in the terminal will be fully opaque. You can
probably guess what terminal emulator I recommend you use :-)

-- Evan Klitzke