You've probably all noticed that development of ROXTerm has been quite
slow the last few years. Basically I don't have much time or motivation
to work on it any more.

I've discovered that it doesn't work properly in Wayland. The old code
has got messy, with workarounds for size management problems that
cropped up in GTK2 but may not be relevant any more in GTK3 and beyond.
So it really needs a major rewrite.

One question I have about such a rewrite, is the timing of GTK4. If
that's just around the corner it would be best to wait for that to
reduce the long term workload and avoid bringing GTK3 legacy baggage
into a GTK4 version.

But the bigger question is whether to do this at all or just lay ROXTerm
to rest? I don't think there's much to differentiate it from, say,
gnome-terminal any more, and I could probably live with that from now
on. When I originally wrote roxterm I was using the terminal more than I
do, eg with mutt for email, whereas nowadays I don't really run any
"applications" in the terminal, just everyday shell commands and
launching gvim.

So, users, are there some unique features in ROXTerm that you couldn't
live without? Do you desperately need it to be kept alive?

On 11/24/2015 11:52 AM, Tony Houghton wrote:
...

But the bigger question is whether to do this at all or just lay ROXTerm
to rest? I don't think there's much to differentiate it from, say,
gnome-terminal any more, and I could probably live with that from now
on. When I originally wrote roxterm I was using the terminal more than I
do, eg with mutt for email, whereas nowadays I don't really run any
"applications" in the terminal, just everyday shell commands and
launching gvim.

I, personally, would be sad to see it go, and as others have said
aptitude install roxterm is one of the very first things that I do on
a new system. Perhaps there is someone else who would want to continue
it? Unfortunately I have neither the time nor the skills to do so.
Perhaps:
http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/10/26/an-experiment-in-reviving-dead-open-source-projects/
https://github.com/jonobacon/adopt-a-project

I was sad to see it missing from
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/15/11/13/1911236/ask-slashdot-what-terminal-emulator-do-you-use
=> http://opensource.com/life/15/11/top-open-source-terminal-emulators
as well, though most of the features discussed there hold zero appeal
for me. Wow, ROXTerm is missing from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_terminal_emulators too.
Tony, you need(ed) a PR person.

It is #5 in http://www.tecmint.com/linux-terminal-emulators/ though.

So, users, are there some unique features in ROXTerm that you couldn't
live without? Do you desperately need it to be kept alive?

The two things that immediately jump to my mind are that tab activity
notifications (that I had a hand in wish-listing [1]) and the
scriptability so I can do roxterm --tab --profile "$ssh_target".
Another critical thing for me is that I can easily re-map
CTRL-Shift-X/C/V to ALT-X/C/V. The ability to name/rename and rearrange
tabs is important, since I have 6 tabs open in one window and 14 in
another. "Ask what to do" when the session is lost is very handy too.
I've noted before that coming from Windows at $WORK years ago, ROXTerm
was the closest I found to the SecureCRT features I liked. (I know
SecureCRT now runs on Linux, it didn't then and I prefer F/OSS.)

Tony, your responsiveness to things above, and other things like CTRL-A
to select all for copy&paste has been great, so thank you! At the same
time ROXTerm Just Works, so there is perhaps less thought than
deserved given to it on a day-to-day basis.

All of that said, I have not looked at any of the other terminals in
years...ROXTerm made that unnecessary. So possibly all the things above
are available elsewhere? I've been poking at Gnome-terminal since it
was already installed. It seems to lack tab activity indicators
(show_tab_status=1 !!!), "always_show_tabs=1" and "exit_action=3" that
I've noticed so far. Wow, G-T won't even tell you when a background tab
exits until you switch to it. Ouch.

Ha,
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22gnome-terminal%22+%22show_tab_status%22
returns a single hit...to the ROXTerm patch
"1.18.5-2ubuntu1/debian/changelog". G-T has had a bug for this since
2004 with zero useful action despite patches,
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132173, that's not good but
about what I'd expect from Gnome. :-(

Sigh, so I got sucked into this and tried "lxterminal" and
"xfce4-terminal". LX was a wash but XFCE-term has "Edit > Prefs >
Appearance Tab Activity Indicator". After some pain I was able to
re-map copy but ALT-V for past silently fails, I suspect due to "View"
menu conflict even though I checked "Edit > Prefs > Advanced > Disable
all menu access keys (such as Alt+f)".

So Tony, whatever you decide, thanks for the years of responsive work
on ROXTerm!!!
JP

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/roxterm/+bug/509544

That's bad if xfce4-terminal is the best alternative. It's still GTK2, which is a pain with hidpi displays, and the corresponding vte lacks some nice features that have been added to 2.9x over the years.

I suppose a rewrite would be an interesting exercise, especially if GTK4 comes out soon. I suspect that might be a long wait though.

No argument. Thus far it's lose-lose. Gnome-terminal seems to do everything except the critical tab status (with a 10+yo open bug), but that's the thing that xfce4-terminal does do.

I've been using roxterm for less than a month. It hasn't been a long time. But I've been using konsole for +10 years.

It was the post on slashdot that JP Vossen mentioned that made me re-test the alternatives and move to roxterm. It does everything an old sysadmin needs from his term application. And it's lightweight. I'm only missing all matches hightlighting on searches [whislist]. Thus I hope it stays alive for long, I can't help with the code but I can help with the Debian package :-)
Thanks for it,
Alberto

I'm only missing all matches hightlighting on searches [whislist]

That sounds like a good feature, but it needs to be implemented mainly in vte. Have you opened a wishlist report for it on bugzilla.gnome.org?

Hi Tony, seems that someone already asked for that [1] back in 2010. We'll have to wait. Not that the missing feature (in vte) will stop me from using roxterm.

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627886

You take your decisions as needed and, most importantly, as you please.

Roxterm is the one application that I run immediately after shooting up the GUI and the only one that stays open during the whole session.
Should I list all that I use to do in Roxterm..? Mutt, slrn of course. Checking a bunch of applications for updated code, running diverse git pulls and gem pushes, reading stuff in w3m (really!) as people incorporate links in mail (remember mutt?). I can add tetris-bsd, but only because the terminal is already open. Now I notice that I hardly use any file-manager application as the console is swifter and I prefer accessing and manipulating folders and files directly in the bash.
Also, there is sshfs which lets me run scripts on remote web-sites to generate lists and other automated tasks

My wife does not care, and does not see a difference when I replace lxterm or gnome-terminal by roxterm. I cannot say she uses it a lot for other things than checking our unreliable network-connection regularly with ifconfig.

You do what you like doing. If I can have Roxterm, I will continue using it. If you stop maintaining it, It will probably take years before I notice... ;-)

I used to use mutt and slrn. HTML emails became too ubiquitous though, so I use Thunderbird nowadays. But I only stopped using slrn a few weeks ago, and that was because I couldn't be bothered with moribund Usenet at all any more. Being able to use it with the same newsrc from anywhere, over ssh, was far better than the dubious benefits of a GUI.

Moved reply to where it was supposed to go... NoScript strikes again I think.

I evaluated many terminal emulators last week and roxterm seemed like the best one. I tried GNOME Terminal for a few weeks, but it didn't have tab activity indicators and couldn't open new tabs next to the current tab. It also took 1.5 seconds to open a tab after I had a ton of tabs and scrollback, and eventually segfaulted after ~3 days of uptime.

I'm a bit surprised if roxterm handles many tabs more efficiently than gnome-terminal, and there shouldn't be any difference in scrollback performance (with the same settings) because it's all handled by vte. But I've been programming since the 80s, so trying to do things efficiently is always on my mind. Roxterm has been known to crash too, and I haven't really soak tested it myself, but I take it very seriously and have always been able to identify the cause and fix it quickly.

I was just reminded of the following which does implement tab activity notifications:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pacmanager/
"PAC is a Perl/GTK replacement for SecureCRT/Putty/etc (linux ssh/telnet/... gui)... It provides a GUI to configure connections: users, passwords, EXPECT regular expressions, macros, etc. ..."

It has .deb, .rpms, etc. but no dedicated PPA so installing updates is tedious, though you can configure it to tell you about them. It also has a bunch of Perl dependencies that are tedious to manually install. I had to do:
$ sudo aptitude install libgnome2-gconf-perl libexpect-perl libnet-proxy-perl libyaml-perl libcrypt-cbc-perl libcrypt-blowfish-perl libgtk2-gladexml-perl libnet-arp-perl libossp-uuid-perl libcrypt-rijndael-perl libgtk2-unique-perl
$ sudo apt-mark auto libgnome2-gconf-perl libexpect-perl libnet-proxy-perl libyaml-perl libcrypt-cbc-perl libcrypt-blowfish-perl libgtk2-gladexml-perl libnet-arp-perl libossp-uuid-perl libcrypt-rijndael-perl libgtk2-unique-perl

I used to use it a while ago but stopped because ROXTerm is slicker and does everything I wanted.

Well it looks like I need to commit to either a rewrite or abandonment very soon, because bug 125 means GTK 3.20 completely breaks ROXTerm :-(.

Hi Tony, just wanted to thank you again for creating ROXTerm, whatever you decision is :-) Best of luck!