== The importance of _xterm_ for X Windows

In an [[earlier entry WhatMadeXSpecial]] I said that you could make a
strong case that X succeeded because its authors spent so much effort on
making _xterm_ a good terminal emulator. Today I feel like explaining
that.

First, let's be clear that _xterm_ was (and is) a very good terminal
program.  It was fast and responsive, it worked well, it emulated almost
everything that a very popular real terminal did (which was important
because at least some things basically assumed that they were talking to
a vt100-compatible terminal), and it had excellent cut and paste support
for straightforward text. These were not necessarily common attributes
in terminal programs at the time (and even later; NeWS had a famously
slow terminal emulator if I remember correctly).

(People sometimes knock _xterm_'s cut and paste support as being
non-standard. That is true, but its cut and paste support is also
extremely fast and easy to use; if you are going to use it a lot, this
matters much more than having a slower but more standards compliant
version.)

This mattered because almost everything people did in new Unix windowing
systems at the time was, well, run terminal windows. This is because the
new windowing system wasn't going to start out with very many desirable
graphical programs for it (and X certainly didn't); as a result, most of
what people did with it was run their existing terminal-based programs
in terminal windows. How nice those terminal windows were thus made a
big difference to how enthused people were about the overall windowing
system; a bad terminal program made the whole system unpleasant or
annoying to use, while a good one made it a pleasure.

(The web has changed this drastically; these days the majority use of
any graphical system is probably to run a browser. But this was back in
the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s.)

My strong impression is that a lot of the competing window systems
considered their terminal program to basically be an afterthought (which
resulted in the sort of terminal program that you'd expect); most of
their focus was on building a graphical toolkit and then some number
of graphical programs to alternately show it off or do useful work.
The problem was that of course these systems could never build enough
graphical programs to make the terminal program unnecessary, even if
Unix people at the time had been willing to give up the command line.
The result was that in practice the experience of using those systems
tended to be kind of unpleasant unless you were doing something that
their particular set of GUI programs were good at.