Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Terminal Alternatives

Apple’s Terminal application is good at what it does, but it doesn’t always satisfy Unix veterans as they first explore Mac OS X. After all, they come from operating systems where the command line represents the primary user interface, even if the GUI-like X Windows are available to supplement it. To them, the Terminal application can seem serviceable but weak, with not nearly the amount of flexibility they’re used to.

Alternatives to the Terminal come in two classes: native Aqua applications that replace the Terminal and bypass Aqua entirely by running genuine xterm windows in X.

GLterm

GLTerm, a shareware application by Michel Pollet available at http://www.pollet.net/GLterm/, represents (at the time of this writing) the only widely distributed, full-featured Mac OS X Terminal replacement application. It supports full vt102 emulation (which can be useful when ssh-ing to a machine that prefers it over Terminal’s vt100 emulation), DEC function keys, and a wide array of customization options different than Terminal’s. (And, it has a delightfully retro Finder icon: a photograph of an ancient vt100 terminal machine.)

On the other hand, GLTerm requires 3D-acceleration hardware to run well (its name comes from the fact that it’s written with the OpenGL 3D graphics libraries, rather than the usual Quartz 2D libraries), and it supports only the Latin-1 character set, not Unicode. It also uses its own X11-based font set rather than the Mac’s installed fonts.

xterm ...