Nicholas Clark writes:
WTF? Why is the hateful thing doing some sort of word wrapping whenever the line has a non-ASCII character? Why can't I disable it?
Other things to hate about Apple Terminal: * It has a Preferences dialog which, following the HIGs, can be found by hitting Command-;. But it puts most prefs not in the Preferences dialog, but in the crack-fuelled "Terminal > Window Settings..." menu item. * It carefully avoids using libc's wcswidth() function to work out the width of characters. Instead, it has a pref (!) to determine whether non-ASCII characters are 1 cell or 2. If you set it to 1, fullwidth Unihan and Kana characters get broken. If you set it to 2, Unihan and Kana work, but everything else gets broken. This is a neat way of ensuring that, for example, Mutt will always get its layout screwed when you receive foreign-language spam. * If you have a UK Mac keyboard (on which Shift-3 is £, and # is found on Option-3), and you sanely set "Use option key as meta key" (so that you can type Meta-f and Meta-b without using the Escape key), there's actually no direct way of typing a # character at all. In theory, it ought to be possible to tell Terminal that Shift-3 is #, and £ is nowhere. In practice, if you try to add a key mapping for Shift-3, you discover that the 3 key isn't in the _special_ set of keys you're allowed to map. Also in theory, you might be able to make it work by editing ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist in Property List Editor. But in practice, you need to use some magic hex value to identify the key gesture you mean. I don't even know where I could look up such a thing. In the end, I gave up: to get a # under Terminal, I have to either (a) remember that I mapped it to Option-F3, or (b) copy and paste from something else. The lack of a working terminal emulator for Mac OS (no, iTerm doesn't count; nor does anything run under X) is one of the reasons I'm going back to Linux once I get a new laptop. -- Aaron Crane
