Friday, April 13, 2007

gnome-terminal Still Too Slow

I was on vacation for almost 3 weeks, and have started to poke again at my various projects.

Over the last 4-5 years, every time that we upgrade or test new versions of GNOME I have tried to slip in gnome-terminal to my beta testers as a replacement for good ol' xterm. gnome-terminal as everyone knows has a much better user interface and fits really nicely in with the rest of our applications. Emulation works fine, and it *should* be ready for primetime. However, as was the case in previous years it's just way too slow to deploy. I keep getting feedback about the 'slowness' of character applications on our network, and must say that I agree. We are using modern thin clients now with RENDER, and any scrolling or cursor movements is still painful. I certainly understand the difference in fonts between gnome-terminal and xterm, but if it cannot be used or deployed they don't have a lot of value. Maybe gnome-terminal needs an option to run old school fonts or rendering for situations such as this?

So, unfortunately for this next round of GNOME upgrade, we are moving ahead with xterm again. gnome-terminal remains my favorite application that I can't use. :)

Shot below is the type of application that I have to deploy along with the version that I tested.