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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...Email from Doug Mink provides more background:To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a stand-alone terminal emulator for the VS100 by Mark Vandevoorde, as my coop student the summer that X started.
Part way through the summer, it became clear that X was more useful than trying to do a stand alone program, so I had him retarget it to X. Part of why xterm's internals are so horrifying is that it was originally intended that a single process be able to drive multiple VS100 displays. Don't hold this against Mark; it isn't his fault.
I then did a lot of hacking on it, and merged several improved versions from others back in.
Notable improvements include the proper ANSI parser, that Bob McNamara did.
The Tek 4010 support came from a guy at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory whose name slips my mind at the moment.
Ported to X11 by Loretta Guarino.
Then hacked on at the X Consortium by uncounted people.
I was checking out the newly revised AltaVista search engine to see what was on the net about xterm, and I found your pages. I can add to the FAQ in that I was the "guy at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory" Jim Gettys refers to. I am listed at the end of the man page under authors. What happened was that I was hired by SAO (after leaving the research staff at MIT) in October 1985 to write analysis software for the Spacelab 2 Infrared Telescope which was to fly on the Space Shuttle in 1985 less than six months after I was hired. I came with a tar tape full of software I had written for Unix and Tektronix terminals, but I was presented with a VS100 terminal which had an early version (X6 or so) of xterm, with no graphics capabilities. SAO is at Harvard, across Cambridge from MIT, where Jim Gettys was detailed from DEC to the X project, and Jim had connections with SAO, having worked here after college (MIT, where we had both worked at the observatory at various times); he was still sharing an apartment with an SAO colleague of mine, too. Anyway, everyone decided that since I knew Tektronix commands pretty well, and our group desparately needed the graphics capabilities, it would be a good use of my time to implement a Tektronix terminal emulator under X. So I set to work learning more C--I had only written a couple of wrappers to C I/O routines so I could use them with my Fortran software--and wrote a Tektronix emulator. The only X documentation at the time was the code itself. While I was at it, I wrote an improved Tektronix emulator for our Imagen laser printer which used the full resolution of that 300 dpi printer instead of the effective 100 dpi (i.e. jaggy) emultator distributed with the printer. The original xterm Tek emulator shared a window with the VT100 emulator, much like on the VT240 terminals which I had been using at MIT before I came to Harvard. With a VAX 750 running several VS100's, window creation was sloowww, so sharing a window was the quickest way to do things, and all of my software was written for that mode of operation, anyway. While I wrote the emulator so that my software would work on it, it was tested by the X group against a BBN graphics package, the name of which slips my mind right now.Anyway, 15 years later, I am still using xterm and some of the same mapping software I wrote the emulator for. And I am still at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
This FAQ is oriented toward the version of xterm originally distributed with XFree86 (also known as "new xterm", with a corresponding terminal description "xterm-new"), which was based on the X11R6.3 xterm, with the addition of ANSI color and VT220 controls.
Xterm runs in all of the implementations of X11.
I've built and run these since I started working on xterm:
The older configurations have X11R5 libraries. Only minor changes are needed to make xterm work on those systems. However, with X11R6 you can obtain better locale support, as well as new features such as the active icon. X11R7... not much to say there.
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. If the underlying operating system supports terminal resizing capabilities (for example, the SIGWINCH signal in systems derived from 4.3bsd), xterm will use the facilities to notify programs running in the window whenever it is resized.
But the program is much older than that.
A lot of people, cited at the bottom of the manual page wrote the original xterm program, maintained by the X Consortium (later part of the Open Group – I'm well aware of the distinction, but am citing when the work was done, not who the current owner may be). There is no changelog, and it is not clear who did what. Email from Jim Gettys provides some background:
Cast of thousands...To give a bit of history, xterm predates X!
It was originally written as a st