[The_Equivocator]

Does anyone know of a telnet program that has full color support? Can this be done through the terminal? It seems like the only colors displayed by the Terminal are the few that I set in the preferences.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[dfiler]

Originally posted by The_Equivocator:
Does anyone know of a telnet program that has full color support? Can this be done through the terminal? It seems like the only colors displayed by the Terminal are the few that I set in the preferences.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Quick answer: No

Long answer: Yes
There are many different types of terminals that you can emulate. This involves setting your TERM environment variable and making sure that you have good termcap and terminfo definitions. Then you'll have to manually create/edit configuration files for any programs that don't reference these two terminal definition APIs. This includes various shells (readlines) and other popular programs like pine and vi.

Fortunately, color terminal emulation never really caught on. There were already so many headaches from the hod-podge of unstandardized control codes for non-color terminals that it just wasn't worth it. While color terminal emulators exist, they are quite buggy and lack support. Nearly everyone uses vt100 emulation but not because it was the best terminal. Rather,it is so prevalent that the spaghetti code behind the scenes of terminal emulation has been debugged and comes configured by default in a manner that is fairly useable. Most of the original hardware bugs are well known and accounted for when using popular terminal emulators. The history of the terminal industry really makes for some fascinating reading.

However, some terminals and emulators did a fairly good job of defining a few basic text-types. These types are usually normal, reverse, dimmed, blinking, bold, and combinations of these attributes. Some terminal emulators let you set text and background colors for each of these attribute combinations. Although the server isn't delivering colored-text, it is delivering text with different attributes to which you can assign colors. (Technically the server sends a mode change command whenever a program switches from say Reverse, to Normal text drawing modes.)

[clarkgoble]

There are a few other terminal applications that have better color support. Check version tracker. I didn't like some of their other aspects, so I never use them. You can also use Fink to install X11 which with OrobosX is actually pretty Mac-like with many applications. Then you can use any Linux terminal.


Over on OSX Hints though they have instructions on how to provide better color support for terminal. I've not tried it so I can't speak for it. Hopefully Apple will make better color support standard in the future. It is annoying to me that half the colors that ought to be supported aren't. See the OSX Hints Tip.

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[Leibowitzn]

I would highly recoment GLTerm.
I use a lot of command line apps and it's a god send. It not only does Color but supports mouse input for those apps that use it (i.e. links).

http://www.pollet.net/GLterm/

[AKcrab]

What about function keys?
I need a terminal app that allows me to program the function keys.

[Amorya]

This true? The telnet in the terminal that came with OSX (10.1) has supported colour just fine for me, and I didn't have to set anything up either!

Amorya

[JLL]

Originally posted by Amorya:
This true? The telnet in the terminal that came with OSX (10.1) has supported colour just fine for me, and I didn't have to set anything up either!

Amorya

That's correct. When I telnet into our Red Hat machines, Terminal shows colors.

[clarkgoble]

While Terminal shows color, it shows only half the colors that many other terminals do. This isn't a big deal for many people. For others though it makes some programs harder to use. Likewise for some apps it doesn't work well. Thus the link to OS Hints I provided.

[macmike42]

As long as you don't need VT3270 (or 3720, I forget, I think it's the first one) support, use XDarwin and xterm. While xterm may quite possibly be the worlds most bloated terminal emulator (aside from eterm), it handles every ANSI, VT100, VT102, VT220, and Tektronix 4014 standard, is ridiculously configurable, and supports just about every non-standard feature there is. It's very nice to be able to use my scroll wheel in VIM on a machine I'm ssh'd in to. GLTerm is nice, and quite fast, but it costs money, and doesn't come close to handling everything an old-fashioned xterm can.