Terminal Emulators (2003-07)

Index

• Introduction
• Gnome-Terminal middle
• Konsole middle
• Rxvt-beta OK
• Xterm (coming XFree86 4.3.0) OK
• Eterm OK
• Mlterm OK
• xvt NG
• wterm middle

Introduction

It is more difficult for terminal emulators to support multiple languages than for window managers. It is because:

• Terminal emulators have to use fixed-width fonts. However, some fonts has 'double' width. For example, if 8-dot-width font is used for ISO-8859-1, 16-dot-width font has to be used for JISX0208 Japanese and KSC5601 Korean. The 'double-width' characters must exactly double visual width.
• Window managers don't need to care about codesets because LOCALE mechanism and X library care about them.
• Window managers need only to display. Terminal emulators have to move the cursor, erase characters, and so on so on.
• Window managers receive strings to be displayed at once. Terminal emulator receive one by one. Even multibyte characters are devided into bytes.

gnome-terminal (2.2.2). It detects the current locale and changes behavior automatically, including east Asian multibyte locales and UTF-8. However, the font mechanism cannot use multiple fonts at the same time, thus various languages cannot be displayed at once.

konsole (1.2.2). It detects the current locale and changes behavior automatically, including east Asian multibyte locales and UTF-8. However, Japanese and Chinese characters are not very beautiful.


However, the font mechanism has a problem and the width of CJK characters are not exactly twice as other characters. This causes curses-based softwares look dirty. Please see the right side of the dialog box.

rxvt-beta (2.7.8). It detects the current locale and changes behavior automatically including east Asian multibyte locales but UTF-8 is not supported.

Xterm (coming XFree86 4.3.0). The version of xterm will detect the current locale and changes behavior automatically including east Asian multibyte and UTF-8, if properly configured. I hope this configuration will be the default for Debian package. The needed configurations are:
(1) use "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1" font instead of "fixed" font. Though there are many iso10646-1 fonts in xfonts-base package, there are only two fonts which has corresponding font for doublewitdth characters.
(2) set resource of "locale: true".

eterm (0.9.2). As same as Rxvt-beta, it detects the current locale and changes behavior automatically including east Asian multibyte locales but UTF-8 is not supported.

mlterm (2.7.0). As the name "multi-lingual terminal", its i18n feature is excellent. It supports not only doublewidth characters but also combining character, bidi (bi-direction), and Indic complex scripts. (Debian package is compiled without Indic support).

xvt (2.1) doesn't support multibyte encodings.

wterm (2.1) doesn't support multibyte encodings.

wterm-ml package includes kwterm, cwterm, and gwterm binaries which support EUC-JP Japanese, GB2312 simplified Chinese, and Greek. However, they don't support Japanese/Chinese input.