Talk:Terminal (macOS)

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This article is nearing complete inaccuracy, especially the entire last paragraph. X11 apps can be executed via Terminal.app, one merely needs to set the DISPLAY environment variable. Additionally, an X server has come with Mac OS X for some time (although it is not normally installed by default).

Jgw 22:48, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

You're right; that paragraph had a lot of nonsense. Tried to fix. – Andyluciano 13:29, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

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Well, I've tried to fix it up a bit more. The list of bash commands is actually tcsh commands, which used to be the default shell. But I am curious to see if the changes I have incorporated "stick" before I sink any more time or energy into this. --Wgscott 03:15, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Easter egg

I am not sure how widely this is known, but there is an easter egg where the terminal runs a kind of "life simulation." You type "emacs" , then ESC and X at the same time, and the type "life" (without quotes). Does anyone know where this originated? Maybe this should be mentioned... (Torus 00:17, 19 December 2006 (UTC))

": It's neither an easter egg nor related to Terminal; it's a game included in emacs, like "doctor". Engelec 01:06, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

And I'm 99% sure its this: Conway's Game of Life DBAlex (talk) 16:35, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:OPENSTEP Terminal.jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 16:04, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Complete nonsense

Terminal is often used to illustrate the difference between the "classic" Mac OS which was developed completely in-house at Apple, and the newer Mac OS X, which is based upon ideas from NEXTSTEP and a BSD Unix-like operating system, namely, Darwin." - This is complete nonsense... How can the terminal be used to compare the two OS's!? IIRC Terminal didn't even exist in OS9 as it is used to access the underlying Darwin/UNIX system... I will remove this section if there are no objections. DBAlex (talk) 16:32, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Complaints

Terminal does not support mouse clicks like xterm. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.206.165.15 (talk) 19:44, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Please direct enhancement requests and other feedback to Apple. You can file a bug report with a (free) developer account <http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter/> or use the feedback page <http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html>. Chris Page (talk) 13:14, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Terminal emulations

See http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_Apple__Terminal_app Terminal.app doesn't actually emulate every item on the dropdown beyond setting $TERM to appease hosts that use this variable. Emulation involves a lot more than that. TEDickey (talk) 20:31, 4 June 2013 (UTC)

"These settings do not alter the operation of Terminal" is 100% false

Of course the TERM setting affects the operation of Terminal... it's what allows vim 256-color colorschemes to work. I tried to edit this, but was reverted. In what universe does changing the TERM variable NOT affect the operation of terminal? Is there a citation for this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.5.37.19 (talk) 19:57, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

The setting of TERM in Terminal as the developer put it says "declare" (obviously not the same individual as the tech writer, who was not that knowledgeable). Inside the terminal, you can set TERM in your shell and using an application which looks up the corresponding information in the terminal database, get the same apparent (mis)behavior, depending on the choice of TERM. If Terminal's operation were affected, you would be able to see (a) different function keys and also (b) different color behavior (both number of colors and some differences in how the erasure affects the display). Testing found no such differences; it's been documented in ncurses for a while (the somewhat lengthy description of the different versions of Terminal aka "nsterm" as well as their respective deficiencies in "terminfo.src"). Use "infocmp" with the given values of TERM to see some of the differences. By the way, vim also looks for xterm's tcap-query feature (introduced in 2000) if TERM has "xterm", and that (like most of xterm's features) is not implemented in Terminal. TEDickey (talk) 20:14, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

By the way, you did not identify the individual whom you supposed to be the developer of Terminal. Both "Chris Page" and "Connor" come up on the link provided, and both agree with the points made above in my reply. TEDickey (talk) 20:40, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

The stackoverflow link confirmed what I said (noting that You can set your terminal to xterm-256color, for example), but your edit again introduced incorrect information by implying that it is necessary for Terminal to set the TERM variable. TEDickey (talk) 20:37, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Without some reliable source, I would be reluctant to introduce Terminal's developer as such. I've found no credible source to date. TEDickey (talk) 20:42, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Text-only applications on OS X

I feel there should be an article on wikipedia somewhere covering the non-GUI applications such as the Python shell, Emacs and Vim releases bundled with OS X: I added a brief section on them here but it was (probably justifiably) removed as irrelevant by another editor. Does anyone know if there is such an article already, and if not if there's some consolidated article somewhere on the internet I could use as a source for writing one? Blythwood (talk) 00:31, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

For "the Python shell", see CPython. For Emacs, see GNU Emacs. For Vim, see Vim (text editor). The whole point here is that OS X is Just Another UNIX (without asterisks, as it's been a certified UNIX(R) ever since Leopard), so, in most cases, there's nothing special about the non-GUI applications in question. Guy Harris (talk) 19:29, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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Web Archive URL cleaned up a bit. Guy Harris (talk) 07:36, 9 January 2016 (UTC)