Types of Text Terminals
From text application's point of view, there exists following three possibilities about the text screen and communications with it, ordered by decreasing of accessibility.
- A genuine text mode display, controlled by a video adapter or the central processor itself. This is a normal condition for a locally-running application on various types of personal computers and mobile devices. If not deterred by the operating system, a smart program may exploit the full power of a hardware text mode.
- A text mode emulator. Examples are xterm for X Window System and win32 console (in a window mode) for Microsoft Windows. This usually supports programs which expect a real text mode display, but may run considerably slower. Certain functions of an advanced text mode, such as an own font uploading, almost certainly become unavailable.
- A remote text terminal. The communication capabilities usually become reduced to a serial line or its emulation, possibly with few ioctls as an out-of-band channel in such cases as Telnet and Secure Shell. This is the worst case, because software restrictions hinder the use of capabilities of a remote display device.
Under Linux and other Unix-like systems, a program easily accommodates to any of three cases because the same interface (namely, standard streams) is used to control the display and keyboard. Also, specialized programming libraries help to output the text in a way appropriate to the given display device and interface to it. See below a comparison to Windows.
Read more about this topic: Text User Interface
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