Comment by vngzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vngzs | Hacker News Reader

    -- $XTermId: README,v 1.3 2007/05/24 19:49:19 tom Exp $
    -- Below is the original README for xterm from 1991, for your amusement.
    -- For a better overview, see http://invisible-island.net/xterm/

                        Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here


    This is undoubtedly the most ugly program in the distribution.  It was one of
    the first "serious" programs ported, and still has a lot of historical baggage.
    Ideally, there would be a general tty widget and then vt102 and tek4014
    subwidgets so that they could be used in other programs.  We are trying to
    clean things up as we go, but there is still a lot of work to do.

    If you are porting this to a machine that has problems with overlapping
    bcopy's, watch out!

    There are two documents on xterm: the man page, xterm.man, which describes
    how to use it, and ctlseqs.ms, which describes the control sequences it
    understands.

There are so many modern, compact, versatile Xterm compatible terminal emulators that can be aliased. Is there any serious reason in 2022 to still be distributing instead of dragging it out behind the woodshed with a shovel.

There is a quote.

Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?

                -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

Well, we have our cathedrals in programing, only we as as software engineers tend to be barbarians and call them "legacy code" or "obsolete systems" or "needs to be torn down and replaced with something new". Think of when people do this to actual cathedrals.

I like xterm, use it daily, I think Thomas Dickey is a pretty great guy for his role in maintaining the program.

https://www.invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.html

Now I feel deservably bad. Xterm is is also part of my daily go-tos.

But then I look through apt or yum and see so many fresh faced usurpers, many written in modern languages... and also hear the same laments that Xterm is "unmaintainable". I didn't think of it as someone's cathedral. I'll put the shovel down. ;)

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