Kterm-0.8.1, 20 Apr 1998


The material contained in here is the first release of an ongoing work
for a VT102 (plus goodies) emulation (xterm, linux console, ktv) widget.

It is not only ment to be integrated in Kom, but also to replace kvt when
it becomes mature enough.


I feel somewhat uncertain, if all the work nessesary to produce kterm in
this released state is really worth the effort, especially since there are
other pressing works to be done for KDE, too, so I include my reasoning
here:

- An intergration of the emulation coded for Kom with a shell was nessesary
  for testing anyway.
- To prevent Kom from being a program usable for bbs' only, it became obvious
  that Kom should contain at least one terminal emulation typical for Un*x.
- When this became clear i contacted Matthias concerning kvt and he 
  encouraged me to work in this direction.
- In fact, kvt is mainly written in C and so the emulation is not usable
  as a widget, yet. One can imagine that a terminal emulation widget would
  be usable within other programs.
- Finally, i must state the fact, that this work sucked up much more efford
  than first expected because of missing documentations, so i was often even
  tied back to reverse engineering.

Anyway, the outcome is this program.


The current state is a (near) complete VT102 emulation widget with a feature
(mouse support) taken from xterm. I'm running it here as the normal working
environment since some weeks and i does well with all the programs i use in
my daily work.

I do not release it as an individual project, but have included it in the
kom-0.3.51 release, instead. I do so since i do not like this program to
get in use concurrently with kvt before both Matthias and I feel that it
is a proper replacement. In the moment, it is definitely not, since kterm
still misses essential kvt features:
- Framework
  - History buffer
  - Copy/Paste using the mouse
  - Nice frame, menu etc.
  - Configurabilities
- Emulation
  - Proper handling of dynamic TABs.
  - Underlined Attribute
  - Bold Attribute in some cases.
  - minor other

From the above list, one can see, that the bare emulation is really near
to be complete, but the main program is more a proof-of-concept, yet.


Since i've been working on it quite a while now and i'm going to get
uneasy feelings about not having it released yet, i do it now, ignoring
all the tasks i see to make it a mature product.

So this release is intended for developers who wan't to get their hands on
a Qt VT102 emulation widget and/or on some documentation related to the
common emus, and for curious people, of course.

I also hope that one or the other might find time to do some beta testing
with it. If you like to, fire it up and use it, until you stumble into
a bug or until you get feed up with using a half-product.


Currently, i'm working to put together a proper documentation defining
the emulation precisely. This came out to be absolutely nessesary, since
there is no precise documentation available on the internet yet, making
any maintainance, production or use of a terminal emulation a guess game.

I plan to complete this documentation together with the emulation which
will form the next KTerm release.


Meanwhile i would appreachiate any of your comments and reports concerning
KTerm, and apologize to all the users of Kom who're desperately waiting
for new features. They can expect this emulation to be integrated into
Kom soon after the next KTerm release and will receive an emulation with
it then as excelent as kvt or xterm are now.


Share and enjoy,

  Lars
