As everyone know, the XTerm is a terminal emulator. It emulates (among others) the ancient DEC VT102 text-only terminal. But that’s not all. It can also do some graphics because it can also emulate the Tektronix 4014 terminal. And these Tektronix ones were actualy able not only to do text but also some points and lines! The main limitation is that Tektronix emulation is “black and white” only (it recognises just two XTerm colors: the foreground one and the background one).
This emulation is a bit limited but it’s fully functional. To enable the Tektronix emulation mode it is only needed to use the -t command line parameter:
xterm -t
Then is is useful to set the TERM variable to something like “tek”,
“4014” or “tek4014” (the “tek” one worked for me very well):
export TERM=tek
By the way, this stuff also worked for remote connection. So you can set the Tektronix mode for your local XTerm and generate graphics at the opposite end of your connection. For example you can run the Gnuplot on the SDF and see the graphs on your local XTerm.
The Gnuplot can produce results in Tektronix-compatible format. Just
set the proper terminal:
export TERM=xterm
There are also other Gnuplot terminals (“vttek”, “tek40xx” and so) but the “xterm” one is the best suited for the XTerm – it actually opens two XTerm windows. The first is the Tektronix emulation one for graphics and the second is a VT102-compatible one for the Gnuplot command interface. So you can work in the same way as if you are using the default X11 output window. The main difference is that thus way is more resources-friendly and work wonderfully also for slow remote connections (and there is no need for the remote server to have anything realted to the X11/Xorg. The SSH/telnet connection is just enough).
There are other programs which can save in Tektronix-compatible format. Their output can be plotted with help of the “plot” program from the GNU Plotutils (the old UNIX “plot” or “tplot” program should work, too):
cat yourfile.out | plot -Ttek
The Plotutils also include modern versions of other classical UNIX tools. There is a “graph” program, for example. But you can find more in this great
old tutorial from the Oregon State University. The whole “Coping with Unix, a Survival Guide” tutorial is great reading, by the way.
I have to thank to the Mastodon user niconiconi who tooted about this long-forgotten ability of the XTerm. I was aware of that but never tried it before.
