suggestions for lightest X terminal or tail program?

[mikshaw]

So far it seems like rxvt, but I'm hoping for something even lighter.

Actually, I don't need a full terminal emulator, since I'm happy with aterm for interactive use.  What I'm hoping for is something that will just tail a file in X...I don't need a prompt or any other interactive features.

I also have root-tail as a possible solution, though I haven't yet compared its resource use with rxvt.

Here's the specific plan:  I have a game set up to run from .xinitrc as an alternative to the window manager, for when I just want to play that game without running any other applications.  It takes a while for the game to start, though, so I currently have aterm running tail on the game's output (a file) while it loads.
The game is heavy on resources (which is why I run it without a window manager), so ideally I'd like to be able to replace aterm with a tiny app that does nothing except tail.

Thanks for any suggestions.

EDIT: I've found blurt and xrootconsole so far, both tiny in size but I haven't tried them yet.

[mikshaw]

It seems that blurt is a bit buggy...i had a situation where the desktop froze for several seconds every time I tried to do something, so I discarded it.  I couldn't compile xrootconsole because it insisted that the includes should be in /usr/include

But I did find xvt, which seems to be an even smaller version of rxvt.  The executable is only 51k (rxvt is 86k).
A comparison of aterm, rxvt, and xvt, as shown by top:

Code: [Select]

VIRT RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM  TIME+   COMMAND
4752 2012 1388 S  0.0  0.8  0:00.15 aterm
4552 1920 1320 S  0.0  0.7  0:00.26 rxvt
2916 1384 1100 S  0.0  0.5  0:00.02 xvt


[tobiaus]

you need a term that you can consult without switching from one screen to another, right? this isn't something that you can just startx & instead of startx then just use tail on the other page...

[mikshaw]

you need a term that you can consult without switching from one screen to another, right?

no, I don' care about consulting it while the game is running.  The in-game console is available for that...besides I have to get it out of fullscreen, taking another few seconds,  before I can send the system any input, so it would be kind of annoying to switch back and forth.  The term is there to do only two things: 1) give me something to look at while the game loads (otherwise it's just a blank screen for several seconds), and 2) if the game crashes, the term is there to hopefully show what happened.

this isn't something that you can just startx & instead of startx then just use tail on the other page

I'm not sure what you're saying, but it sounds pretty close to what I'm doing.  I have a tiny wrapper script that sets a WM variable and then runs startx.  In .xinitrc, I check for that variable and run applications accordingly.  When I want to play the game I use the wrapper instead of startx. It would be pretty much the same as if I did "WM=something startx", but saves some keystrokes.

So far xvt seems to be pretty good.  I honestly didn't think I'd find a terminal emulator lighter than rxvt.  There was one in the works from garbeam (suckless.org), but it appears to be in limbo at the moment.

[tobiaus]

the term is there to hopefully show what happened.

oh i see, my idea wouldn't be useful then, it won't let you run xwin games from the textmode vt.