[gberz3]

Hi All,

I'm an OS X / Linux user. In most of my Linux distros, all versions of the "terminal" have fast cursors. I can press left or right and be at the beginning, middle, or end of a long command in a flash. It appears, however, that there is no way to get that kind of cursor movement speed in OS X. I'm hoping I'm wrong.

I'm not looking to simply hop spaces. I want a sort of "fast forward", not "skip frames".

Anyone?

[besson3c]

Have you tried iTerm? I don't think it has a user definable preference for this, but iTerm + control A + control E seem quick to me.

iTerm is better than Terminal anyway... I love having Terminal tabs.

[Chuckit]

You can set the key repeat rate in the Keyboard section of the System Preferences. Try setting it to maximum. It's still not quite as fast as you can get on Linux, but it's a lot faster than the default.

[Brass]

iTerm is all very well... except that it crashes too much. A terminal application doesn't have to crash very often to be crashing too much.

[JKT]

Ctrl-e and ctrl-a work in Terminal as well, fwiw.

[gberz3]

Originally Posted by JKT 

Ctrl-e and ctrl-a work in Terminal as well, fwiw.

As I said, I'm not interested in "skipping frames" I simply want to move forward or backward quickly. I want per-letter accuracy.

Thanks.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Brass 

iTerm is all very well... except that it crashes too much. A terminal application doesn't have to crash very often to be crashing too much.

When was the last time you tried iTerm? iTerm used to crash all the time for me too, but I haven't been able to crash the recent versions literally at all, and I live in iTerm. I suggest giving it another chance.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

When was the last time you tried iTerm? iTerm used to crash all the time for me too, but I haven't been able to crash the recent versions literally at all, and I live in iTerm. I suggest giving it another chance.

I still use iTerm (0.9.0) all day every day for my job. It still crashes a couple of times a day. This is a serious pain in the proverbial for a Terminal application. I still use it though, because the Mac OS X Terminal application is so weak. (I've heard the Leopard Terminal application has some significant improvements, and I may switch to it then).

Looking now, I see that iTerm 0.9.5 is available... how did I miss that? downloading now. Will see if it's any better.

[besson3c]

Brass: it is much better. It also has a functional software update mechanism built in.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Brass: it is much better. It also has a functional software update mechanism built in.

Does look better. 'Option' to toggle between new window and new tab makes the menus a little easier to navigate too (particularly the Dock menu which I use all the time). Still doesn't bring new windows to front when creating one from the dock menu though.

[gberz3]

Well, I have no problem with the Terminal application otherwise. I've got it customized to the hilt, with items like "bash-completion" installed and the like. I simply need a faster cursor as I originally posted.

Can anyone actually help with that?

[gberz3]

. . .not to mention, iTerm doesn't even fix my issue. I need a faster cursor. I want it to move left to right and vice versa faster. iTerm seems to have no setting for this. Instead of creeping across the screen at 25mph, I want it to go about 100mph.

[besson3c]

Did you try setting your keyboard repeat rate as suggested?

[Kevin]

Why is it that open source applications always have like 10 pages to click through to get to the actual download?

I guess thats how they pay for development...

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by Kevin 

Why is it that open source applications always have like 10 pages to click through to get to the actual download?

I guess thats how they pay for development...

I'm going to have to go with 'poor understanding of what user friendly actually means'. You'll notice Adium has a single click to download, front & center .

[Kevin]

Yeah well I guess I can't say ALL open source software. Just a lot of it. "Click here to go to a page that will take you to a page that takes you to that page where there is a link to the page the link is on"

I stopped using versiontracker because of that obnoxiousness.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man 

I'm going to have to go with 'poor understanding of what user friendly actually means'. You'll notice Adium has a single click to download, front & center .

Well, if you are distributing software that requires a lot of bandwidth, many open source developers will opt to link Sourceforge for the download, and I've always found Sourceforge to be a little awkward, although it has gotten better.

[gberz3]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Did you try setting your keyboard repeat rate as suggested?

I did, but that affects everything. I have no problem with other applications, only terminal. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to trade off, but it seems like this should simply be a "cursor option" in Terminal.

Thanks for the input.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by Brass 

Does look better. 'Option' to toggle between new window and new tab makes the menus a little easier to navigate too (particularly the Dock menu which I use all the time). Still doesn't bring new windows to front when creating one from the dock menu though.

grrr... latest version of iTerm just crashed on me. It's certainly a big improvement over the previous version I was using, but I just can't afford to have a terminal application that crashes during critical server administration tasks.

Will send the crash log to developers.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Brass 

grrr... latest version of iTerm just crashed on me. It's certainly a big improvement over the previous version I was using, but I just can't afford to have a terminal application that crashes during critical server administration tasks.

Will send the crash log to developers.

That's why using "screen" is a good idea for important tasks... Do you use screen?

[Brass]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

That's why using "screen" is a good idea for important tasks... Do you use screen?

No, I've not used it before. Looking at the man page, it looks OK (could be used similarly to what I've used VNC for in the past).

But the point is that it should not be necessary to run screen because my terminal application is unstable. I mean what if "screen" was unstable? My terminal application should be as stable as "screen". I've never seen xterm crash, and iTerm should not crash either.

Having said that, I still love the features of iTerm, and will continue to use it for most things, and will continue to use xterm (usually on Solaris, because my Mac is a laptop) for long running jobs.

EDIT: Actually on second thoughts, 'screen' looks more like a terminal with tabs for people without a GUI.

[besson3c]

Screen is an administrator's best friend. Seriously, it is very useful on any terminal implementation since there is never any guarantees that your machine will stay up and running for the duration of the job.

Basically, screen will allow you to detach your job, close your terminal, even turn off your computer, SSH back in to your remote server, and reattach yourself to the job. Even if you forget to detach your job (control A then control D), if your machine blows up or something your job will still be running on the server and you will be able to reattach yourself to it once your machine is back up and running again.

Screen is built into OS X and most Unix OSes. To use it, all you have to do is SSH into the machine, type "screen", start your job, and press control A control D to deattach yourself from it. To reattach to your session, do a screen -r. There are also ways to toggle between running jobs. In a way, you can think of screen as like having multiple tabs in a single window, if that makes sense.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Screen is an administrator's best friend. Seriously, it is very useful on any terminal implementation since there is never any guarantees that your machine will stay up and running for the duration of the job.

Basically, screen will allow you to detach your job, close your terminal, even turn off your computer, SSH back in to your remote server, and reattach yourself to the job. Even if you forget to detach your job (control A then control D), if your machine blows up or something your job will still be running on the server and you will be able to reattach yourself to it once your machine is back up and running again.

Screen is built into OS X and most Unix OSes. To use it, all you have to do is SSH into the machine, type "screen", start your job, and press control A control D to deattach yourself from it. To reattach to your session, do a screen -r. There are also ways to toggle between running jobs. In a way, you can think of screen as like having multiple tabs in a single window, if that makes sense.

I agree that it looks useful. And would make a good work around for the instability of a terminal application. But it's disappointing that I can't rely on the stability of a terminal application. It should be just as stable as screen, and my workstation should be just as stable as the server (my solaris workstation sure is, and my Mac OS X workstation hasn't crashed in a couple of years).

So I can see the use for screen as a convenience if I want to log out of my workstation, etc (I used to use VNC for this sort of thing). But using screen as a workaround for the instability of a terminal application is a very sad thing to have to do (but looks like it may be necessary if I want to use iTerm).

[besson3c]

Agreed...

However, I've had Apple's Terminal crash on me too. I don't know why some terminal implementations are crashy, and I agree that ideally it would be wise to be able to fully trust them as well as the stability of your system as a whole. However, I still recommend using screen for running important tasks on any system.

[gberz3]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Screen is an administrator's best friend.

. . .

Basically, screen will allow you to detach your job, close your terminal, even turn off your computer, SSH back in to your remote server, and reattach yourself to the job.

. . .

Screen is built into OS X and most Unix OSes. To use it, all you have to do is SSH into the machine, type "screen", start your job, and press control A control D to deattach yourself from it. To reattach to your session, do a screen -r. There are also ways to toggle between running jobs. In a way, you can think of screen as like having multiple tabs in a single window, if that makes sense.

OMG! I posted this question about 400 years ago at another forum and was consistently told that this type of thing wasn't possible. If "screen" works as you say it does then it is exactly what I need (for a job completely unrelated to this thread )

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by gberz3 

OMG! I posted this question about 400 years ago at another forum and was consistently told that this type of thing wasn't possible. If "screen" works as you say it does then it is exactly what I need (for a job completely unrelated to this thread )

Wow... screen has been around for 400 years too, I didn't know it was that well kept a secret


Here is a basic screen tutorial:

GNU Screen: an introduction and beginner's tutorial || kuro5hin.org

Looks like the detach key command is control A then D, not control A then control D (although this works too)

[Hal Itosis]

gberz3,

As far as moving the cursor quickly goes, most shell users define
ctrl left-arrow and ctrl right-arrow to jump from word-to-word.

The following lines are in my ~/.bashrc file.
[another place to put it could be ~/.inputrc]
[codex]
# - readline bindings:
bind '"\e[5D": backward-word' # control left arrow
bind '"\e[5C": forward-word' # control right arrow
[/codex]

These old macosxhints should still be relevant:

Make Terminal.app key mappings work in bash
How to paste Escape sequences in Terminal's preferences

[gberz3]

@"Hal"

Excellent! Thanks for that