Whoo. That's probably the hardest week of work I've put into anything in ages; I'm really trying to make good use of this four-week holiday before I have to go back to work.

I've just spent a week writing an xterm clone, by means of porting the terminal-emulator half of PuTTY to run on Unix and GTK. The result, as of this evening, is now at a point where I think it can sensibly be turned into a reasonably widely usable Debian package, and indeed Colin has already filed an ITP for this purpose. For the last hour and a bit I've just been typing frantically in an attempt to get one more command-line option and a man page checked into CVS before the magic moment at midnight which will be used to generate tomorrow's source snapshot, because then said snapshot will actually be suitable for handing over to Colin tomorrow.

Irritatingly I checked the last bit in at two minutes to midnight, breathed a sigh of relief ... and then realised that we're in BST whereas CVS snapshots work in UTC, so actually I had an extra hour I hadn't known about :-) Probably for the best, though; writing large chunks of documentation from scratch is best done in a state of absolute panic, otherwise I tend to procrastinate for ever...

It's a really nice feeling, though. I've had a long and turbulent relationship with X terminal emulators, because none of them ever did all the things I wanted at once; I ditched xterm many years ago in favour of rxvt, not because rxvt did what I wanted, but because it was made of more comprehensible code and so it was easier to hack until it did. For several years now I've been using a personal hack on rxvt, but even that wasn't quite what I wanted. Meanwhile I've been developing PuTTY constantly, and recently I looked at it and realised that it was no longer running to keep up with real terminal emulators like xterm: it was actually comparable or better. So now I've done the port, and can begin the long but pleasurable process of retraining my reflexes to get rid of the workarounds I've evolved for shortcomings in my rxvt hack...

... And the thing that really makes me smug is that although what I wrote pterm for was the features and the little things it does right that other emulators do wrong, it's also fast compared to other emulators. I did a quick test of "time ls -l /dev" on four emulators, and the results were: xterm in fourth place at 2.8s, my rxvt hack in third at 1.3s, gnome-terminal beating both handily at 0.12s, but pterm storming into the lead at 0.07s. Nearly a factor of two faster than gnome-terminal. I'm pretty pleased with that, since I didn't even deliberately write it for speed!

So, I've been working on this pretty much solidly for a week and it's now finished, at least enough for a first release. I think that means I should go and get some sleep, and then spend tomorrow relaxing and doing very little :-)