## 1.2. The Terminal and xterm Compared

There are several important differences between Mac OS X's Terminal application and the xterm common to Unix systems running X Windows:

- You cannot customize the characteristics of the Terminal with command-line switches such as -fn, -fg, and -bg. Instead, you must use the Terminal's Show Info dialog.

- Unlike xterm, in which each window corresponds to a separate process, a single master process controls the Terminal. However, each shell session is run as a separate child process of the Terminal.

- The Terminal selection is not automatically put into the clipboard. Use -C to copy, -V to paste. Even before you press -C, the current text selection is contained in a selection called the pasteboard. The operations described in Section 1.4, later in this chapter, use the pasteboard.

- The value of `$TERM` is `vt100` when running under Terminal (it's set to `xterm` under xterm by default).

- Pressing PageUp or PageDown scrolls the Terminal window, rather than letting the running program handle it.

- On compatible systems (generally, a system with an ATI Radeon or NVidia GeForce AGP graphics adapter), the Mac OS X Terminal (and all of the Aqua user interface) will use Quartz Extreme acceleration to make everything faster and smoother.

If you need an xterm, you can have it; however, you will have to install a compatible version of the X Window System first. See Chapter 9 for more information about the X Window System.

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