Party Like It's 1982.

Monday October 17, 2005
I have recently installed Ubuntu Breezy. It's pretty awesome.

However, I have a problem. All the terminals on pretty much all modern Linux systems (Ubuntu, Debian, FC3/4, etc) are either broken or impossible to configure. I assumed that these issues would be fixed in the new distro, but they seem to be getting worse - I guess terminals are falling out of vogue.

xterm displays "ÿ" when I hit M-backspace, which should be "delete previous word". This is a keystroke I use a lot. It also corrupts the terminal by improperly interpreting a multibyte sequence as a single character for forward movement rather than backward movement.

gnome-terminal - crashes all the god damn time, for no reason I can discern. screws up Epic pretty regularly.

xterminal - this one is my favorite. It screws up my backspace key when I run screen locally. Emacs thinks I'm typing C-@, zsh and bash don't delete a character.

rxvt - least buggy of the bunch, and it looks like what I'll be using, but ... Xt-style scrollbars? no antialiased fonts? no interactive font selection? customization through X resources? Seriously.

Hey, maybe they could figure out a way to make me care about how many stop bits I'm using, that'd be so retro!