Mac OS X for Unix Geeks

The Terminal and xterm Compared

There are several important differences between Mac OS X’s Terminal application and the xterm common to Unix systems running X Windows:

• You cannot customize the characteristics of the Terminal with command-line switches such as -fn, -fg, and -bg. Instead, you must use the Terminal’s Show Info dialog.

• Unlike xterm, in which each window corresponds to a separate process, a single master process controls the Terminal. However, each shell session is run as a separate child process of the Terminal.

• The Terminal selection is not automatically put into the clipboard. Use ⌘-C to copy, ⌘-V to paste. Even before you press ⌘-C, the current text selection is contained in a selection called the pasteboard. The operations described in Section 1.4, later in this chapter, use the pasteboard.

• The value of $TERM is vt100 when running under Terminal (it’s set to xterm under xterm by default).

• Pressing PageUp or PageDown scrolls the Terminal window, rather than letting the running program handle it.

• On compatible systems (generally, a system with an ATI Radeon or NVidia GeForce AGP graphics adapter), the Mac OS X Terminal (and all of the Aqua user interface) will use Quartz Extreme acceleration to make everything faster and smoother.

If you need an xterm, you can have it; however, you will have to install a compatible version of the X Window System first. See Chapter 9 for more information about the X Window System.