Lamenting the aging ETerm

I’ve installed E17.

Of course I have. I’m in search of a pretty desktop. Why? because I *like* eye-candy. I see no reason in running a powerful PC, and then putting a decent operating sytem on it, only to have it run IDLE most of the time. If you’ve got the power FLAUNT it. Beef up your shiney shiney desktop, and make it loog good

I’ve always liked Eterm. I like the random background idea, I like the way the text looks. It just seems to do what it says on the tin. The biggest problem is that the last update was now nearly 4 years ago (at the time of wrighting), and it has aged. In all fairness to it, it has aged well. It still works, and it still compteantly deals with the real-world. I should know. It’s always my default terminal, even on Fedora, where you have to jump through hoops to get it working.

There are things that are not standard with modern terminals that it lacks.

• It doesn’t change the title when you SSH somewhere, or when you change user
• It doesn’t deal with colours very well. Admitedly, that’s because it announces it’self as ETERM, which would be fine if it was still in development, still being used, and people actually thought about supporting it as a proper terminal
• It’s not (yet) updated to work with the shiney new E17 tools, so you get the nice backgrounds. Heck, it’s now begning to lagg behind gnome-terminal

So, what can be done?

I’ve looked at the source code, and scratched my head. I’m not a natural C Programmer, and I don’t know if I have the skill required to re-vitalise this aging application. I know nothing about make files, or how to make a patch. I know how to use all those things, but how to make one.. well, that might just be an ocean too far.

Also the fact that I don’t really have the time to put into a project like this. It would mean having to use Eterm at home, which is not a bad thing, at least, not on my laptop, but the downside of that is that the one JAVA app that I would want to use is so baddly written that you can’t close windows on linux.

A sorry state of affairs huh?

Of course, I don’t have the time to do it at work. I’m a System Administrator with a load on my plate, and updating this application is going to take a whole lot of work.

Perhaps I will try it at home, see how far I get. Perhaps, just perhaps, I can get it working.

Any suggestions on where I can start looking for helpful documentation would be apprecaiated!

Thanks,

BX