Bonus: twin, bigger and better than ever

I wasn’t going to mention twin again. I talked about it more than once some years ago, and it is a reasonable substitute for a window manager or a terminal multiplexer. I admit that.

In fact, I wasn’t even going to keep it on my list, because it’s not really an application. But just for kicks I tried it out against the framebuffer on the extra extra machine today, and wouldn’t you know it …

Picture perfect, after all these years. So that’s what I get for poring over old pages of long-dead blogs: Something that seems to have improved. Who’d’ve thunk it.

twin is running here against the framebuffer on an Intel 945GM graphics card — something which is unpredictable at times.

But you can see that it works. You’ll need gpm as a mouse interface, and possibly something other than the default font (may I respectfully suggest Terminus, which works wonderfully at the console).

Shortcomings? Well, there are a few, but only a few. Line drawing is awkward, but that might depend on the application. You can see mc running there with the -a flag, which defaults to plain ascii. htop is hopelessly scrambled.

And mouse movement seems a little clunky, which might not be the fault of twin either. I am accustomed to the speed and snappy behavior of screen-vs; going back to the mouse seems like a delay.

Regardless: You’ll have to try it out and see if it suits you.