Wayland Gets A Native Terminal Emulator

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wayland Gets A Native Terminal Emulator

The latest achievement within the Wayland camp is wlterm, a native terminal emulator...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE5Mzc

[birdie]

BO$$

There are native terminal emulators for Wayland, no?

Michael:

Screenshots would be nice.

[pingufunkybeat]

I haven't slept in 2 days and I can't focus, but why do we need this again?

Because xterm doesn't run.

Or do you mean "why do we need a terminal"?

[89c51]

from the mailing list:

You may wonder why wlterm is needed? There are several reason why I wrote it:

1) We need more independent clients written from scratch that try to
find bugs in the wayland-client API. If we use toytoolkit all the
time, we will probably not find them. wlterm draws its own decoration
and does not depend on any demo-code from the weston repository. So
its nice to check whether new weston features are working and how they
behave. The more independent implementations we have, the better
testing we get.

2) I use it to test the TSM library. TSM is a terminal-emulator state
machine that parses vt220/xterm control-sequences. It has no
dependencies at all and does not perform any rendering. It is solely
to parse and interpret CSI/OSC/etc. sequences. There is no such
library out there so I created TSM (which is already shared between
wlterm and kmscon). Other libraries like libvte have huge X, Gtk, Qt
etc. dependencies (sadly). And Kristian asked me whether it makes
sense to also share it with weston-terminal. Keep in mind that
weston-terminal does interpret only a small subset of xterm
escape-sequences and no-one really wants to maintain/develop a full
parser in weston-terminal (or is someone working on that?).

3) Get a proper and maintained emulator for weston. I intend to
maintain wlterm together with kmscon (but both will remain independent
from each other). So feel free to file bugreports, feature-requests or
happy-user-feedback. I am open to suggestions. But I am a horrible
designer so don't expect it to be fancy. I rather work on
functionality than on beautiful decorations. I will also keep the
"master" branch a "stable" branch so you can expect it to always work
and to contain no experimental features (no guarantee, though).

4) To get more insight into wayland protocol internals. As I am
working on man-pages for libwayland, I wrote the small fake-toolkit
from scratch to get a better feeling. I can recommend this to
everybody who wants to get more knowledge on how it works. And to
everybody who wants to contribute to the man-pages...

[RealNC]

I haven't slept in 2 days and I can't focus, but why do we need this again?

We don't. It's not for end users. The article failed to mention that.

[dvdhrm]

BO$$

There are native terminal emulators for Wayland, no?

Michael:

Screenshots would be nice.

There is one in the "Downloads" section of wlterm:

http://cloud.github.com/downloads/dvdhrm/kmscon/wlterm.png

[StephanG]

Regardless of the reasons developers have for writing whatever it is their writing, and regardless of what it's intended to be used for, there seems to be this cancer in the Open-Source community about coming up with the worst possible names for things.

Now, we have another name that is difficult to remember, and distinguish from others. For example, we already had: eterm,xterm, xiterm, pterm, roxterm, kterm, uxterm, mlterm, fbterm, jfbterm, kxterm. Now we also have wlterm.

And we wonder why people have difficulty distinguishing between the various projects and packages... Come on guys, rather choose names like Guake, Konsole, Putty. Hell, call it Barbie if you want to. But, PLEASE, let's start moving away from this horrible convention of using acronyms to name things.

[Ericg]

Regardless of the reasons developers have for writing whatever it is their writing, and regardless of what it's intended to be used for, there seems to be this cancer in the Open-Source community about coming up with the worst possible names for things.

Now, we have another name that is difficult to remember, and distinguish from others. For example, we already had: eterm,xterm, xiterm, pterm, roxterm, kterm, uxterm, mlterm, fbterm, jfbterm, kxterm. Now we also have wlterm.

And we wonder why people have difficulty distinguishing between the various projects and packages... Come on guys, rather choose names like Guake, Konsole, Putty. Hell, call it Barbie if you want to. But, PLEASE, let's start moving away from this horrible convention of using acronyms to name things.

+1

The acronym-ish names are getting REALLY annoying and just a pain to say in conversation (yes some FOSS users actually have to SAY these names not just type them where its easier) Konsole? Great name. Guake? Awesome. Yakuake? ....less awesome but atleast its not an acronym. Wine? An acronym but atleast you can say it in normal conversation.

LETS HAVE NICE NAMES!

[jmiahman]

Nice.. Relative..

Nice seems somewhat relative, and many would argue acronyms are used to help people remember. wl-term (wl = wayland, term = terminal) not that tough pretty simple (along with all the others), get over yourself. Obvioulsy you would have to make a complaint to the OpenSource marketing team ahead of such projects to chose a better name then what the developers do.. wait there isn't one, it's volunteer work.. huh