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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

I also use a VT520 on a regular basis, and support nowadays is limited.

- Since it cannot display Unicode, i have to wrap most things in a screen or tmux session to have unicode characters replaced

- Flow control is a hard requirement - just a single thing like a irssi screen scroll is enough to fill the buffer terminal-side

- tmux is hard-coded to disable software flow control, so i have to make sure the RTS and CTS lines are connected for hardware flow control or switch to using screen

- In fact, for hardware terminals, screen makes much more sense than tmux

- The connection is unstable above 38400, just single missing bytes cause TUI applications to render incorrectly

- I had to ship a custom terminfo with my dotfiles for the status line (what is the window title in xterm) to work correctly

Procrastinating in IRC and mailing works fine via irssi and mutt. Developing is a bit harder since i am used to mouse-based clipboards.

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Honest question - is this due to professional requirements, or is this like a masochism thing? I just don't understand why you'd go through the trouble willingly.

I still use serial terminals too, also a VT520. The 520 is a bit more modern than the others, it allows PC keyboards (PS/2) and higher speeds. The vt220 would already choke on faster streams than 19200 IIRC. It also has more spacious modes than 80x24.

I don't use it for everything but one of the nice things is that it is easy to concentrate on something. No chance of procrastinating by opening facebook :)

And as a debugging / recovery tool it's sometimes handy, when the whole GUI side is crashed I can still kill some processes. Sometimes I can't switch to a text CLI console even.

And the retro feel simply appeals to me. I know it's not for everyone.

I've actually been thinking of making something like a modern terminal. Like a Raspberry pi with an SSH client in baremetal so it boots really quickly, with easily switchable font sizes etc. But it's too much work I don't think I'll get around to it. Maybe I'll skip the baremetal part and just go for fbterm on a really cut-down Linux distro, that might work.

>I don't use it for everything but one of the nice things is that it is easy to concentrate on something. No chance of procrastinating by opening facebook :)

Lynx works over m.facebook.com, and slashem/frotz is a great time waster :D. Once you play slashem as a doppleganger monk, or play Anchorhead, Spider and Web, or Slouch over Bedlam under Frotz, that stance is not taken as granted.

Once you've got it running, it isn't (usually) any trouble. Doesn't everybody have a drawer full of null-modem adapters, DB9-DB25 adapters, RJ11/RJ14/RJ45 => DB9 cables, and a Zoom 14.4K modem that probably still works if the AC-DC adapter can be found?

I'd venture a decent percentage of HN was born after 14.4k modems stopped being popular.

Considering that the median global age is 30, this seems like a safe bet.

So at 35, I’m statistically above middle age.

Whoa.

Depends on your location of course. In the USA I believe the median age is 38 and in Japan it's 48. But globally speaking, at 35 you've got one foot in the grave already :=)

Most of this, plus USB-serial adapters (I've heard that PCs with native serial ports are now considered "professional" equipment), plus some more exotic ones. A decade ago I used to use port switching boxes and to assemble adapters like Lego bricks to connect the square peg with the round hole . But that's only because I work in embedded.

And there's the software too: the buggy Hyperterm (except the private edition), Procomm, Minicom... These days I use Knossos' dterm ( http://www.knossos.net.nz/resources/free-software/dterm/ ).

>>I've heard that PCs with native serial ports are now considered "professional" equipment

I mean, laptops, sure. But PCs I think most still have a COM port. I bought a "gaming" X570 motherboard recently and there's still a COM header on it, I'd need to buy the port itself but the mobo does support it natively.

Microsoft started an initiative in the late 90s to abolish "legacy" ports from PCs including serial, parallel, and PS/2. RS232 is not something you can expect on consumer-grade equipment.

I think COM headers on motherboards are common still, but no longer ubiquitous. For A520 ITX boards it seemed about 50:50 if they'd have a com port.

Private. I'm a terminal monkey in the first place, so its not such a big deal for me.

I also spend a lot of time in the terminal. What possible reason could I have to use a VT220 over not using it?

One reason against would be I guess the VT200 is a lot less pleasant to look at than an average display device one has laying around in 2020?

I find the VT520 more pleasant to look at than a LCD screen. The VT has a CRT and no backlight - when its dark, the screen doesnt "glow". The brightness and contrast are adjustable via two potentiometers, allowing eye-strain-less reading during the night.

The terminal bell makes an audible beep, i use that to signal stuff happening in IRC.

Probably because its a CRT, it also doesn't inhibit me from getting tired in the late hours like a phone or laptop does.

Last but not least, the hackability: You can interface the VT via uart, and thus can use it as user interface to an arduino or other retro computers. KVM-like switches are also easy to DIY for serial connections.

The smooth scrolling is also very nice, but you'll lose that when you use a terminal multiplexer :(

Not a terminal user, buy VTY and framebuffer. I use a sound bell with a tmux config for that, but with a sound file from the infamous Sun Multimedia mirror from sunsite. On being tired, I can set the laptop brightness too with light(1).

Where do you hang on IRC? I want to get back into IRC but not sure where to go.

I'm usually in #tildetel and #tilderadio. https://tilde.chat/

Cool thank you!

There aren't many practical reasons to do it these days, but they are beautiful machines and a joy to use. While you won't have a VT 220 as your daily driver, it's perfectly good to keep one in place of one terminal window.

Lower latency is a strong motivating reason to use a serial terminal over anything connected over usb/double buffered display.

It's a personal thing, but I am not that annoyed by the delay between a key press and a character comes up on the screen. OTOH, I still remember how pleasing were 3270's compared to serial terminals on 9600 shared links.

Even with flow control? Do you have a link to perf numbers?

My dad said a big advantage of the hjkl navigation keys in vi were that they were single character. The arrow keys were multi character, so if the escape character got dropped, you would end up sending control codes as plain text

I thought about buying a VT520, I have a WY185e, which I've used lots and lots, and it basically sat on my desk to the better part of 15 years.

VT520 here too, can you share your custom terminfo?

https://git.lain.church/nero/etc/src/branch/master/terminfo/...

Notable deviations from the default curses db:

- Using a PC keyboard instead of the DEC keyboard (different codes for F-keys)

- Fixes for status line

Thanks for that!! I also use a PC keyboard with my 520.

tmux/screen have one.

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