I love old terminals. I used to sit at the ones in the library for ages (I often managed to 'escape' into the data controller somehow :P ). And at college, all the X-Terminals were often occupied because they were the only way to run NSCA Mosaic to see this cool new "Internet" stuff. Meaning the rooms full of green screen terminals were completely deserted. I usually took two for myself (This was before I learned of Gnu Screen and tmux lol)
I still have my own VT520 <3 Not getting rid of it (my girlfriend keeps asking why do I keep that old thing around, grrr)
My WYSE 180E is still sitting in the garage for much the same reasons.
I used that every day as my daily driver terminal for 10-12 years - I got it was what was effectively NOS, so zero hours on the tube. I've not turned it on I think in 8 or 10 years.
I'll drag it out once I clean up the garage this summer.
Yeah my VT520 is also very clean. Unfortunately though it's one of the later ones sold by Boundless. The same thing but not the DEC logo, and that matters a bit.
App support is pretty horrible these days though. Most apps don't bother reading termcap/terminfo anymore and just blast Xterm whatever to the terminal :) That makes the functionality a bit limited.
I did some of my best work on those terminals though. Especially because they didn't have a browser. Very distraction-free. I can see why this works out so wel for people like George R.R. Martin.
Putting screen in the middle is actually the fix for that - Screen has been very good for me at acting as a decent translation layer for misbehaving apps.
I was a screen holdout for a long time too but in the end tmux won me over :) But I still know screen very well.
So tmux doesn't do this well either? Too bad. I'm not surprised screen does it well though, with its long history.
By the way one thing that's a bit sad about the VT520 is that it looks really boring. It has a standard "VGA Monitor from the 90s" look. The great thing is that it takes standard PS/2 keyboards unlike the previous special ones. But the VT220 and VT320 looked much cooler.
Not to mention the VT05 by the way, that was straight out of star trek <3 It was deep as hell though, no way that would fit on a modern desk. It didn't even have a CPU, it was full of boards of discrete logic.
tmux might work - I tested early with tmux but the last time I bothered was pre-1.0 versions of tmux. Screen supports it well, but tmux is probably worth testing.
Someday I need to procure a VT oh Wyse capable of Tektronix graphics to serve as a reference for a project I’m doing, but they aren’t easy to find on this side of the Atlantic.
I still have my own VT520 <3 Not getting rid of it (my girlfriend keeps asking why do I keep that old thing around, grrr)