Most of my text files use the Windows Latin-1 encoding (the same as the default ISO Latin-1, but with curly quotes and other useful control characters in an otherwise-unused range). No problem for the Terminal: you can set the character encoding in Window Settings->Display. I hit this one a LOT. It's a real annoyance. If the terminal app crashes you lose ALL of your terminals! So, is there a secret terminal port from NeXTSTEP lurking in the pocket of some intrepid young hacker, who is, as I write this, poised to lead us to salvation?"
Sure, transparency is nice, and with some hacking about (when was the last time you had to force "stty erase"?) you can get decent enough color xterm emulation, but. Apple's Terminal is slow (though performance has been better in 10.2.x), doesn't support xterm mousing, and for some reason refuses to send PgUp/PgDn through to any applications running in the terminal (gah!)."Take, for instance, the following options: What's your answer to the state of terminal emulation on the Mac?" Drawoc summarizes the currently available offerings and their drawbacks, below.
Unfortunately for me, decent terminal emulation seems to be one area where Mac OS X is quite lacking. However, due to the sort of development work I do, I spend a great deal of my time in a terminal. Drawoc Suomynona asks: "After settling into Mac OS X over the last four months, I'm generally impressed.