MacTelnet 4 Advance Look (MacTelnet Home Page)

Last updated: Saturday, May 16, 2009

This page shows off some of the features of MacTelnet 4 that are in progress. Check back periodically to see new stuff!

You can just jump to the screenshots and video gallery at the end, if you like.

If you want even more detail than this, check out the change log for the daily builds, which sums up pretty much everything that has ever happened since 3.0!

MacTelnet 4 is not finished. It is finally available for testing, and is updated very frequently in the form of daily builds. Your constant testing and feedback will speed up development and allow MacTelnet 4 to be ready for general use much sooner.

New Protocol Support

Bonjour Auto-Discovery: The new Servers panel allows you to easily create commands that connect to remote servers; and if Bonjour automatically discovers a service, you can turn it into a Unix command line with one click. [Screenshot]
IPv6: So the only host address you have looks like 2007:000a:001c:1dba:0000:ffff:1170:9820? No problem!
Secure Protocols: MacTelnet now provides front ends for SSH-1, SSH-2, and SFTP in addition to TELNET and FTP. (Yeah, we need a new name for this program.)
URLs and Files: A significant number of URL and file types can be directly handled by MacTelnet, including Apple ".command" files and the "x-man-page" extension. And if you feel like writing some Python code, you can literally extend MacTelnet to handle any file type or URL that you want!

Enhanced Emulation

Rewritten VT Core: A new foundation to allow better performance, flexibility and accuracy in terminal rendering.
Dumb Terminal: MacTelnet now offers a dumb terminal type (that does no interpretation whatsoever), whose presentation of character codes is completely customizable through Python.
256 Colors: When emulating XTerm features, the full palette of standard colors may now be used.

International and BBS Support

Limited Rendering: Note that so far in this beta, although all data is correctly represented as Unicode internally, the terminal renderer is not capable of displaying all possible characters (yet).
Translation: Automatically reinterpret incoming text for correct display on your computer. This is not just for other languages; for instance, BBS gamers might choose the "Latin-US (DOS)" encoding so that a remote DOS game (which uses Code Page 437) is rendered correctly.
Import/Export: Copy and Paste and drag-and-drop use full Unicode, even for graphical characters such as line-drawing.
Special Characters Palette: Standard Edit menu command to access the system-wide palette of symbols.
Input Window: The floating command line is a full-fledged text input window allowing composition of any character from any language, and can be used to enter text correctly even if terminal windows themselves do not render every character (yet).
And More: Finally, write characters from any language into your macros, filenames, window titles, preference set names, or other settings.

Enhanced Terminal Views

The primary terminal window interface continues to improve. [Screenshots]

Optional Tabbed Interface: Glue windows together if you want to, so they move at the same time. Unlike typical tabbed interfaces, MacTelnet keeps each tab in its own window. So tabs can have different sizes, or their own custom toolbars, or even open sheets that do not block other tabs. Finally, you can unglue any tab as the start of a new workspace of tabs.
Live Resize: One of the most overdue new features is live resize information, allowing you to pinpoint your window size (in either terminal screen dimensions or font size!) while you drag.
Focus-Follows-Mouse: A new preference allows you to type into whichever terminal is underneath the mouse, a Unix-like behavior.
Random Formats: You can choose to pick the set of colors and fonts for new windows randomly, based on whatever Format Favorites you have defined. (This is currently a low-level property list setting.)
Cool Blinking Text: When something as annoying as blinking text is part of the standard specs for a terminal, what should we do? Why, make it downright cool, of course! A quadratic-delay pulse effect makes blinking text animate smoothly in MacTelnet, so it is far less distracting than actual flashing. And you can still change the blinking colors to anything you want. [Video]
Intelligent Paste: If the Clipboard contains more than one line (often a disastrous thing to dump into a Unix shell), using Paste will now display options: for example, joining the lines together before continuing with the Paste.
Matte: In addition to the regular background, terminals can now have a border whose color is set separately.
Custom Terminal Bell Sounds: Although MacTelnet has always allowed arbitrary bell sounds through a magic filename, now there is a proper user interface for choosing any sound in your library.
Floating Command Line Improvements: Now uses a much improved text interface, with many standard key equivalents. Command history is now available via a pop-up menu or the down-arrow key.
Terminal Search Improvements: MacTelnet now has a very fast, scan-as-you-type, multi-selection Find dialog: all matches in the active terminal window (main screen and scrollback) are immediately found. Also, the search window now remembers your recent searches and saves its state between uses. [Video]

Cleaned Up Vector Graphics

Improved Rendering: The foreground and background of TEK graphics windows now use the same colors as your Default for terminal windows. Also, some internal optimizations have begun to make the rendering slightly faster. [Screenshot]
Renaming: It is now possible to set any title for a canvas window.
Live Resize: Vector graphics windows now scale as you resize the canvas!
Bugs Fixed: You can once again copy rendered graphics to the clipboard. There is no longer any limit to the number of canvases you can open. Graphics open behind terminal windows so that focus is no longer stolen. A number of other bugs have been fixed.

Updated Key Palettes

Key palettes have been reimplemented as fully native Aqua windows with regular buttons and crisp new icons. [Screenshot]

Full Keyboard Access: There are key sequences to allow directly displaying or focusing any palette, in addition to the standard equivalents for focus (Control-F6) and close (Command-W). You can also navigate to all key buttons using the keyboard.
Help Tags: For keys that are normally labelled only with an icon.

Notifications

Let MacTelnet monitor sessions for you, automatically flagging or responding to interesting events!

Activity Notification: For windows that sit idle for long periods, you can have MacTelnet tell you when new text appears.
Idle Notification: For windows that are really “noisy”, MacTelnet can tell you when they seem to have finally settled down.
Keep-Alive: For sessions that may automatically terminate after long periods of inactivity, this allows you to send text to them periodically so they stay “alive”.
Support For Growl: “Session active”, “Session idle”, “Session ended” and “Session failed” notifications are sent through Growl when it is available, allowing you to customize the appearance and behavior of pop-up windows.

Revamped Macros

Macros are short-cuts that allow you to run complex tasks using a simple key combination. MacTelnet 4 enhances these in several important ways. [Screenshot]

New Modeless Editor: Since macros have moved into the Preferences window, they can be changed immediately like any other preference.
Actions: Macros are no longer limited to sending text: you can also have the text interpreted as a URL (like a bookmark), or as a command (like a shell).
More Keyboard Equivalents: Macros can now be activated by any character key, or by one of over two dozen “special” keys such as arrow keys, page keys, function keys, and more. Plus, you can require any combination of modifier keys (command, control, option, shift).
More Escape Sequences: MacTelnet 4 now supports higher ASCII codes with \1nn sequences, in addition to its previous \0nn and other sequences.
Names: Every macro can have a custom name, so it is easier to tell at a glance what they do.
Macros Menu: You can choose to automatically display a Macros menu whenever a macro set is active, which will display each macro’s custom name and key equivalent.
Fast Switching: Since macro sets are now collections like any other, they have “first class” placement in the menu bar and you can instantly swap between them.

Fully Upgraded Preferences System

Both the back-end and front-end to preferences are overhauled in MacTelnet 4.

New Look: MacTelnet now uses a window style that is more consistent with the rest of Mac OS X.
Translation Favorites: Translation tables are back, along with an interface for making your own character mappings.
Format Favorites: Now fonts and colors are on their own, free of those cryptic terminal settings!
Live Collection Editing: Now, when you select Sessions, Macros, Translations, Terminals or Formats, a drawer appears with all of your saved collections. Just click a collection and edit it live in the Preferences window! Manage the list of collections directly from the drawer.
XML: No more opaque files! MacTelnet 4 uses XML, like so many other Mac OS X applications, and even includes a converter application to automatically import your settings from older versions.

Session Manager

Interact with every open session from a single window, using the Session Info command. (Menus also provide much of this functionality, as they have in previous MacTelnet versions.) [Screenshot]

Customizable: Go ahead and put your favorite short-cuts in the toolbar, or mess with list columns.
Interactive: Double-click a session in the list to activate its window, or click its window title to rename.
Clear: At a glance, see the status of everything; for example, which sessions have sent notifications.

Session Duplication

The Duplicate Session command now works properly: it automatically opens a new session that uses the same command as the active session.

Accessibility

Full Keyboard Access: Since the entire user interface has been upgraded, MacTelnet natively supports full keyboard access in all user interface elements by default, and will support any future assistive technologies added by Apple.
VoiceOver: In addition to default behaviors, MacTelnet provides a number of descriptions and relationships between elements to improve the experience for users of VoiceOver or a similar technology.

Extensibility

External Data: MacTelnet default configuration data is now available in its bundle, allowing administrators to customize it very easily.
Python: The core of MacTelnet 4 is a revolutionary new scripting framework. Interfaces known as Quills can now be used to access MacTelnet from scripts written in the Python programming language. For more information, see the Quills page.