The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

While xterm may use about 8 times less memory than konsole (with 6 tabs open at present), each new terminal requires another 2MB, whereas a new tab in konsole doesn't.

So, if you're in the position where you are already using screen and need multiple terminals, xterm doesn't have so many advantages.

BTW, konsole has profiles too - but I think they cover more aspects than gnome-terminal's does (which application to start - ie bash vs mc vs su - bash etc), and you can assign a default schema to a profile - and the profiles may be accessed easily from the session menu.

Finally, konsole has some features I haven't seen in other terminal emulators, like intelligent drag-and-drop. Yes, I said drag-and-drop. Like if you have a file manager window open, you can drag a directory to konsole and you are given a menu to either cd, ln, cp or mv the directory.

Different people want different things from terminal emulaters, but if you're already using the best unix desktop, konsole would be the better choice for many ;-).

I like white-on-black terminals, but after a while the plain black background gets to me. So years ago, I generated a tiled turbulence image using the GIMP, and darkened it down to nearly black. It's an extremely subtle effect, but it gives my eyes something to "grip" onto. In the real world, I have a similar preference for slightly-textured recycled paper.

Yes, I'm probably weird.

Every non-xterm I ever tried (particularly those derived from rxvt) has crashed on me. Crashing is not something I expect in a terminal emulator, or in anything, really, but browsers, e-mail readers, and, lately, window managers and desktop menu bars seem designed to crash, so much so that they have special features to "recover" better. So, I still use xterm, and I disable color when I can, for reasons Jon mentioned.

gnome-terminal: also has drag-n-drop (it just requests the text/plain version of whatever was dropped), also highlights URIs and email addresses on the terminal (clicking opens GNOME's preferred URI handler or mailer), and also has --use-factory which reduces the marginal cost of each additional terminal. Unfortunately, it's really slow compared to xterm (as is konsole).

The editor may be interested to know there is another terminal emulator with Tektronix functionality: NCSA Telnet. Yes, I mean the MSDOS (and MacOS) application with it's own TCP stack found here:

http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/PCTelnet/

My roommate in college had a diskless PC/XT and used NCSA Telnet to work on Unix hosts. He even browsed the web, using the Tektronix terminal for porn^Wgraphics. Pretty amazing piece of software.

Has occasionally given me odd behaviors --- something that is not quite bug-compatible with xterm's own VT terminal emulation.

The native xterm and Putty (on Windows) are the two best that I've found.

As for most other "grumpy" features, I use screen. This is better than "tabbed" sessions for me (takes up no screen real-estate), gives me a searchable backscroll buffer, keyboard driven cut-n-paste, offers the multi-user option if I want someone to be able to connect and work with me or just watch what I'm showing them (read-only mode if I like), and lets me yank my text sessions over to another connection (detach and re-attach).

screen even preserves my vital text/curses applications through the occasional windowing system crash (assuming that the rest of the system is still accessible).

So I think I'll stick with my "screen session in an real xterm" approach for the foreseeable future!

JimD

The biggest problem with gnome-terminal is that with the move the VTE for rendering, CPU usage is through the roof. When compiling apps, gnome-terminal can consume more CPU than gcc.

And here was me thinking the X-Resource configuration of xterm was a *bonus*... at least for a geek like me.

Having to go through a GUI (or edit a set of config files that are *truly* opaque because they represent a GUI's persistence) in order to configure my terminal is too much. I understand that this is easier for the new user and that it's more intuitive, but if you want to copy your config places, it's painful. If you want to know what's going on, it's painful. (In other words, the needs of the geek are different from the needs of the newbie, and it's a *rare* program that even comes close to addressing both.)

And, I used to have the problem that my Gnome config would get screwed up and I'd have no idea why, nor what file to blow away to fix it. I'd end up blowing away my .gnome directory (effectively) and starting over in the GUI config. (Nowadays I use fvwm which has a nice text-editor-based cofig system that's geek friendly. Not user friendly, but then, I'm a geek.)

-Rob

Strange that you complain about limited choices for fonts on Konsole,
when it's xterm that gives the limited choices once it starts. (Of
course you can select any font before starting it.)

I'm using KDE 3.1.5, and Konsole's font submenu has "Custom..." at the
bottom, under all the standard choices. I use Andale Mono, which will
probably never be one of the default choices.

Your editor, who long since found a monospace X font which optimizes both readability and screen space

Must be lucidatypewriter. The best monospace font ever.

For people that like the pointer-hiding features of gnome-terminal and konsole, have a look at the unclutter package. It hides the pointer if it is still for a little while on any window.

As far as I know, the only way to get it is through Debian, but it is easy enough to compile.

I agree that rxvt is long in the tooth, but don't discount it so quickly. In fact, the features you like (in particular the Athena scrollbar, which I wholeheartedly agree is the best scrollbar ever invented in terms of functionality--even if it looks very dated) are definitely still there!

Rxvt has a whole plethora of configuration options, so many that most distros just pick one or two of the "most popular" (which usually means whatever the person packaging it thinks--often enabling as much stuff as possible) and package those up. If you get the rxvt source distribution and build it yourself (which doesn't take more than a few minutes) you can get a very workable xterm emulator without the extra cruft you don't like, and still be able to add in just things you do like. Examples of available options, in addition to the X scrollbar, include 256 colors, transparency, XPM backgrounds, menubar, handling for X resources, mousewheel support, etc. Even utmp/wtmp population.

Also, I find it very stable; I've used rxvt for years and years, since the days when it was bundled with fvwm.

In my environment I use _tons_ of rxvt's. I use the window manager's menus to choose them. Tabbed browsing seems cool, but my setup is very customized so that I have buttons that invoke rxvt's which do all kinds of special things like log into remote hosts, set to special environments, etc. I don't know how to connect my buttons up to gnome-terminal with some kind of remote command to tell it to create a new tab in some particular instance, containing a session with specific characteristics. Finally, in my experience as with other comments here, the new emulators tend to have redisplay and scrolling that's far too slow.

Ah, yes. The ADM1A. I remember it fondly. I had one at home, connected to a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem. My cat liked to sleep on top of the terminal in the Winter because it was warm. One day, the cat barfed into
the keyboard. I took the cover off the 1A, took it into the back yard,
hosed the cat barf out of the keys, dried it out and it worked like a charm.
Xterm and Konsole do it for me today. Don't forget that IRAF users still need the Tektronics emulation of xterm to display their plots.

-- alonzo

I have tried out numerous terminal emulators and I have to say that the venerable xterm is still king for me. Setting the background to darkslategrey, the foreground to gold, the cursorColor to green and the pointerColor to yellow gives me a very easy to look at window. The scroll bar is mandatory as is paste with middle mouse button. Copying defaults from one machine to another is simple since everything is in ~/.Xresources. And I like my 7x14 font.

Now if you are talking about terminal emulators for 5250 terminals, that's a whole different story. In that case I like tn5250 but even more so x5250 because I wrote x5250 :)

Gnome terminal - probably any terminal using xft, that is even xterm in xft mode - can be really annoying when you have fast-scrolling text.
Call something producing text quite fast - such as compiling a 2.4.x kernel on a remote machine or just catting /usr/share/dict/words - and you will really notice the speed difference.
Doing the cat in gnome-terminal makes the Xserver use 60% of the CPU, gnome-terminal 40%.
Doing the same on a pterm (normal fonts) will be so fast i can't even give you the percentage split used. (but IMHO pterm has other issues, including that it goes nuts sometimes when un-maximizing it)
xterm, even when not using xft, is also taking considerable time for the cat. (64%/36% split)
aterm is almost as fast as putty, using normal fonts, but doesn't support UTF-8.
mlterm is somewhere between aterm and xterm using normal fonts.
konsole appears to be a slight bit faster than gnome-terminal, apparently using some "flood detection" and skipping on fast output.

In total, <b>there is no terminal emulator with which i'm 100% happy</b>.

I'd love antialiased fonts, but the gnome-terminal sometimes causes the xserver to take up a lot of CPU (peaks lasting a couple of seconds; if i had a reliable way to reproduce this i'd report it... must be something like the xserver forgetting the font, then having to regenerate it for AA), i'm really annoyed by that. Konsole without KDE is a desaster. Putty has the window resizing issues and i really hate its configuration menus.
I'd like a stripped down xterm (i do not need any menu) but rxvt appears to be dead upstream.
In fact i dislike all the bells and whistles. What i expect from a terminal emulator is to have UTF-8 support, scrollback and to be fast. I don't need much else: if you want tabs, use a window manager that can do so. ;-)
Also i dislike any kind of menu, scrollbar or configuration dialog that is not integrated into my desktop. For me this means: either do not provide such things, or use GTK. But this is my taste.

I have to say gnome-terminal is really really good, only terminal that comes close to xterm and the UTF-8 handling is really good, thanks to GtkTextWidget (I guess). However, that damn widget is also it's biggest problem - the GNOME people refuse to change the behaviour for right-clicks to take standard xterm convention into account, so instead of right-click behaving as $DIETY intended and changing the end-of-selection point, it brings up a damn GTK cut/copy/paste context menu.

Also, changing gnome-terminal key mappings is completely non-obvious, indeed I havnt found a way yet. Though thankfully most of the default key-bindings are unobtrusive, however I havnt found how to reconfigure them (Sun ship gnome-terminal with pageup/pagedown bound to scroll up/down, no obvious way to change it).

If it werent for those things, the right-click issue in particular, i'd switch from xterm to gnome-terminal.

Here is my grumpy user setting. I was given one of those new fangled 24 inch monitors and it has quite a bit of screen space. So I try bringing the xterm up to 256x80 so I can look at logs.. and if I type beyond the 80 characters, I get xterm hell.. line redraws that make no sense, and my editing becomes a couple of characters, ^L, couple of characters, ^L, etc etc.

All the terminals I have tried (konsole, gnome-terminal, xterm, rxvt) all seem to exhibit this.. so I am figuring I must be doing something wrong :).
It pretty much happens right after I move past the 81-84 column...

oh well.. I should be happy to be blessed with vision that can read such small characters.

"gnome-terminal also has a nice feature in that it makes the pointer fade away as soon as the user starts typing. No more moving the mouse around to get the pointer out of your way. An invisible pointer might seem like a human factors problem in its own right, but the simple fact is that you generally have to move the pointer to find it anyway."

On gnome one can configure <Ctrl> key to locate the pointer. Use Preferences-->Mouse-->Cursors to set it.

The review, while rightly congratulating the enhancements in gnome-terminal and konsole, left out some new goodies that I consider of primary importance:

1. Antialiased fonts. Does anyone here use LCD monitors at all? The new subpixel antialiased fonts are head and shoulders above any of the fonts that used to come with xterm. On a conventional CRT monitor I can see why people might prefer their old fonts, but for me the increased clarity of properly antialiased LCD fonts alone is enough reason to switch to a new terminal, no matter what the performance penalty.
2. UTF-8 support. It's ultra cool that I can fire up vi and edit Japanese and Chinese text at the same time. Even if this could somehow be done with xterm, you would need the previously mentioned antialiasing to make it look decent. For a good half of the world UTF-8 support is a mandatory, not optional, feature.

I have been using konsole for a long time on my (ancient) laptop, and it is great. the two features I use the most are (a) tabs, and (b) changing the background image of a given tab. Since konsole remembers its settings on shutdown/startup, this means I always get a konsole with 4 tabs, two of which have a different background than the others. I use these to ssh into other servers, and I can tell at a glance which tab I am on (while the titlebar also tells me this, I have a tendancy not to look at it very often, and have found myself to paste or type into the wrong tab often).

Well, recently, I gave up KDE in favor of a XFCE, and wanted to remove KDE and all of it's dependencies from my limited HD. Also, Konsole requires arts which causes problems on my aging laptop (which has suffered a partial audio hardware failure).

So I've tried to find a term that has (a) tabs, and (b) different backgrounds (even a solid color would do) for different tabs, and guess what. There are none. The closest I've gotten is eterm and 'screen'. This gives me my tabs, but not different backgrounds, and screen has its own limitations.

The other options would appear to be fluxbox, which uses the WM to do tabbing and would let me set up an environment I'd like, but I just can't seem to make fluxbox give me an environment I like.

I've tried gnome-terminal and powershell (which have slightly fewer dependencies), but couldn't get it to either to give me different backgrounds per tab, and overall just found them a bit cumersome to use.

So while I agree that there are great terminals out there, trying to find ones with advanced features with minimal dependencies is not easy.

I used to hope gnome-terminal would start passing ^@ to the application (as one of my apps needs it, and I use it regularly). Maybe it does now, but I just use xterm. Anyway, if anyone's compiling a list of things to check for in terminal emulators, please add that to the list.

As for colors, I finally gave up trying to find a combo I wanted to stick with. Instead, I found a whole class of background colors I like. So I wrote an xterm starter in Perl that picks a suitable background color for me at random from those that meet my criteria. It gets called when I click on one of those new-fangled icon thingies at the bottom of my screen. It's a work in progress that sort of stopped progressing when it got good enough. Yeah, it's a resource hog, but they're my resources. (Oh, and the indentation/brace placement style you've never seen before is as God intended. :) Here goes. Enjoy:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my @colors = ( 'wheat' );
if ( open COLORS, "/usr/X11R6/bin/showrgb|" )
    {
      my ($minc, $mind, $maxd ) = ( 127, 7, 97 );
      while (<COLORS>)
        {
          chomp;
          my ($r,$g,$b,$cname) = split /\s+/,$_,4;
          next unless $r > $minc && $g > $minc && $b > $minc &&
                      abs( $r - $g) > $mind && abs( $r - $g) < $maxd &&
                      abs( $r - $b) > $mind && abs( $r - $b) < $maxd &&
                      abs( $g - $b) > $mind && abs( $g - $b) < $maxd;
          push @colors, $cname;
        }
      close COLORS;
    }
my $bg = $colors[ int( rand @colors ) ];
exec '/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm', '-bg', $bg, '-fg', 'black', '-fn', '9x15';

You can't really judge a terminal emulator without at least running the vttest program in them. That will show you the true level of functionality of the terminal itself. I have found that xterm does the best emulation, and I have to use it whenever accurate terminal operation is required. Some programs, like pine and others, really use most of the terminals features. I have also found gnome-terminal to be the least "standards" compliant. Rxvt is pretty good, and Konsole is also pretty good. Gnome-multi-term (different from gnome-terminal) is very good also.

> Fortunately, nobody seems to set up either emulator with background images
> by default.

... knoppix being a notable exception. Even worse, it sets a semi-transparent background exposing the desktop wallpaper.

Overall, xterm rules, for sure (though lately, konsole isn't bad).

Although my primary terminal is xterm (IMHO the only terminal where UTF-8 is real and where I can enter russian text resonably well), when I need to cut and paste, I use shell window in emacs.

For text selection I prefer to use keyboard and since AFAIK there is no terminal emulator that allows to select program output using only keyboard, emacs or any other editor with a shell support is the only option.

In the Unix tradition of cargo-culting configuration files, I've had this in my .Xdefaults for something over a decade now

XTerm*VT100*translations: #override \
Shift<Key>Return: string(" &") string(0x0A) \n\
Meta<Key>Return: string(" | less") string(0x0A) \n\
~Shift<Key>Prior: scroll-back(1,page) \n\
~Shift<Key>Next: scroll-forw(1,page) \n\
Shift<Key>Prior: scroll-back(1) \n\
Shift<Key>Next: scroll-forw(1) \n\
<Key>Delete: string(0x1b) string("[2~") \n\
<Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)

(watch out for whitespace munging: all lines but the first are indented one tab)

The Delete and Backspace bindings are probably not doing anything useful any more on a modern system, but pressing shift+return to background a job is now bound so deeply into my finger macros that I'm unlikely to be moving from xterm any time soon just for that reason alone

Modern (u)xterm has a good support for many i18n features (e.g: combined characters) . One thing it does not support is bidirectional rendering (bidi, for short). This is important for languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.

terminal emulators that support bidi (to the best of my knowledge):

* konsole, as of KDE 3.2
* mlterm
* xiterm
* Maybe emacs, with the bidi support patch

I generally dislike knosole, and I certainly don't need it to drag all the noisy KDE daemons with it. One of its nice feaatures is that I can disable the bidi support (and even set a shortcut for that).

mlterm has most of konsole's features (except, probably, bookmarks).
allows temporary disabling of bidi support at run-time (though I'm not aware of any keyboard shortcut for that. It requires using a UTF-8 locale for bidi support (no a big deal, as usually one does not need any other locale).

xiterm uses the i18n code Sun release two years ago. It does not seem to be well-maintained and does not seem to be very potent.

I am glad that Aterm got at least an honourable mention at the end. Whenever I have to use an older machine I am glad it is there. On machines that just crawl with gnome-terminal or konsole I can have many Aterm sessions open and things stay snappy. I find it much faster than xterm as well.

I always assumed it was related to memory usage but I have not tested that theory.

I don't usually use eterm. But I recently noticed it has an interesting feature:

Instead of building their own multiple-termials imlpementation, they chose a wrapper around screen. screen has a very mature multiple-sessions implementation which is highly usable.

An extra atvantage: you should be able to switch between displays.

One thing I've not yet seen mentioned is clipboards (a.k.a. "selections").

Both xterm and Gnome Terminal paste from both PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD when using <shift><insert>, whereas Konsole appears to paste only from CLIPBOARD. I don't know if this is configurable or not, but it drives me nuts if I can't paste from PRIMARY with the keyboard. Konsole is otherwise a fine terminal program.

I still haven't found anything to beat plain old xterm, either... The biggest feature I can't live without is the complete configurability of all keys/buttons, and controlling what sequences they send or actions they perform... It allows me to use a souped-up terminfo in combination with it, so that I can write ncurses apps that, for instance, are able to intercept CTRL-arrow keys, or SHIFT-Fkeys, or etc... I haven't found another terminal emulator which allows that level of control...

And, as for fonts, I use a non-standard font: "-jmk-Neep Alt-Medium-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-80-ISO8859-1"... (Which can be gotten from http://www.jmknoble.net/fonts/...) I like it because it's one of the few I've found with a dotted or slashed zero... It really, really annoys me (and, makes programming really difficult) if I can't tell my O's from my 0's! ;-)

But, the one thing I really wish for in a Linux terminal emulator is support for a MUCH wider range of emulated terminals... Most of them pretty much only emulate vt100, or some sub/super-set thereof... Which, of course, is all you need to interact with most Unix software... However, it'd be nice to have the option to emulate other types of terminals, if you ever need to connect to some system that expects some particular type of terminal... (Eg: what I REALLY want is a terminal emulator that runs on Linux which accurately emulates a QNX console/terminal... Because, I often connect to QNX machines at work from my Linux machine at home... I've managed to coerce a customized xterm with customized terminfo setting on the QNX box to work well enough for me, but I'd still much prefer a true QNX terminal emulation...) There are hundreds of such terminal emulators on Windoze, which emulate damn near everything in existence... But, on Linux (and, all other Unices, I think), everyone just seems focused on vt100 and friends, and ignores pretty much everything else (except weirdo stuff like Tektronix, which was mentioned in the article)... Why is that?? Or, am I missing something? Anyone know of such a wide-ranging terminal emulator (or, just one that supports QNX terminal emulation)?

Is the Open Group code worth mention?

http://ftp.x.org/pub/R6.4/xc/programs/xterm/

I thought I heard they were going to Open Source some code. Is it any better than Dickey's xterm?

I like the "multi-gnome-terminal". It supports "bonding" of tabs, which is very useful if you want to execute the same command on several machines, but it's also a good general-purpose terminal emulator, IMHO.

I've been using xterm for a long time because it's available on all the unix systems I have to work with. Having one standard interface to a terminal makes things just a little easier. There are some things about xterm that I wish were done better (like color) but overall it works fine and does what I want it to.

On the font issue, see some of these explanations:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2003-December/msg00085.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-redhat-list/2002-September/msg00015.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/FDU.html#XFT
(there was a better mail but google isn't finding it for me)

If you want an old X bitmap font, just install it. They aren't in the default install because in OpenOffice for example you'd have a huge font list where almost all the listed fonts were hideous bitmap fonts that wouldn't print properly. Thus the default Fedora/Red Hat configuration is to only have a few bitmap fonts in the bitmap-fonts package. But you can easily add any of the old PCF fonts that you want to have.

It sounds like some people are also still missing that GDK_USE_XFT toggled the font subsystem in use, not whether to antialias. The right way to disable antialiasing (and with GTK+ 2.4, the only way) is to configure fontconfig not to antialias as jamesh posted about above - not to change the whole font backend. Changing the backend just disabled AA as a side effect since the old deprecated backend doesn't do AA.

(OK, I'm late to the party, but here's my take.)

After using several terms in the past 8 years (xterm, rxvt, eterm, aterm,
gnome-terminal, konsole), now I'm a happy konsole user. Why konsole?

- It is scriptable via dcop. My work consists of managing about 2 dozens
of server. To open sessions (in tabs) to all those servers, I created a
shell script similar to this:

#!/bin/sh
SESSIONS="
server1
server2
.....
"
KONSOLE=`dcopclient $KONSOLE_DCOP`
CURSESSION=$KONSOLE_DCOP_SESSION
for A in $SESSIONS ; do
NEWSESSION=`dcop $KONSOLE konsole newSession $A`
dcop $KONSOLE $NEWSESSION renameSession $A
done
dcop $CURSESSION closeSession

it's a lot better than 2 dozens of xterms cluttering your desktop and
taskbar :)

- konsole has 'monitor for activity' and 'monitor for silence', the former
is useful for watching if there's an activity (talk invitation, etc) in a
particular tab, the latter is useful if you want to be notified whenever
e.g. a lengthy compile has finished

- if you are like me have 2 dozens of open sessions, you'll appreciate
'send input to all sessions' feature. when this enabled, anything you type
on one tab will also be sent to the other tabs on the same konsole window.
no need to copy commands, and paste them multiple times.

The set of colors isn't arbitrary, it's defined by the ANSI terminal
standard which is an extension of DEC's visual terminal specification.
Criticizing the color selecting is completely counterproductive. That
decision was made by an ANSI committe.

And, as you point out, you can change what these colors are, so you aren't
stuck with the standard ones.

What you seem to really want, though you don't say it, is a new set of
escape codes which allow use of any color, or at least color themes like
"ESC-[-3-T-<name>-;" where name can be something like "text_background".
Or maybe a way for clients to override the ANSI color pallette with new
colors. Then you could have your login scripts print out the magic codes
without having to know what kind of terminal emulator you were using. It
could be wrapped in a nice program "setansi -red e02020 -yellow e0e010"
or similar. Maybe there could be a .ansirc and you could do "setansi
-profile work" or "setansi -profile home".

It would be nice the terminal codes could be standardized in an open forum
with input from many developers (application and terminal emulators) than
for one terminal program to silently implement it. There are far too many
undocumented extensions already.

A screenshot that illustrates the support for color terminal can be found at:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dann/multi-tty.jpg
It shows the colors used for syntax highlighting for an X11 Emacs "frame",
and Emacs frames running on a 256 and 8 color rxvts, black on white and
white on black. This shows that there won't be much difference between the appearance of text in Emacs when running on X11 and a 256-color terminal.

>The conventional wisdom is that, once Linux reaches a true, user-friendly
> paradise state, there will be no need for any command line work at all.

Lol. Anyone who really believes this should try communicating with other people with gesticulations (Gesticular User Interface: GUI) instead of verbs, nouns, adjectives, sentences and punctuation.

A sentence is the smallest coherent unit of verbal meaning. A command is the human machine communication equivalent. Using machines without the power of verbal communication in situations where this can be useful is for dumbing- down merchants and people who want the machines to make their decisions for them.

I happen to run a nice fast machine, (Dual Athlon 1800+, 2GB RAM, running Gentoo), and I have a need for speed.

My comment on this whole deal is that though very functional, Gnome-Terminal and Konsole are both slow to start. I've found that for me, the best blend of speed, readability with default colors, and functionality is aterm. (with -rv, 'cuz I like black background on my terms)

I've got a big monitor, and as such, I don't tend to care for tabbed Terminal sessions - just the ability to launch another one very quickly to be shoved over to one side of the screen. Aterm launches very quickly off my XFCE launch bar.

Don't really care about the eye candy. Tried gnome-terminal etc but always end up using xterm.

1. Selecting text (characters, words, lines and every thing between left mouse btn and right mouse button click)

2. Ctrl+middle button to Clear and reset saved lines, great when compiling pl/sql packages.

3. Scroll bar usage

Nothing really comes close. Would be great if there was an X app that would swallow requested appas and present them in a tabbed window.

The athena scrollbar is a good example of an interface element which has more features but poorer intuition and usability. Given the ability to use the keyboard for advanced actions such as "page up", I say good riddance to bad rubbish. May it rest in pieces.