SigmaTerm

Visit the top of the support page. There is a form at the top of the page where you can enter your email address. An email containing all your license keys will be mailed to you.

Click on About SigmaTerm in the SigmaTerm menu. In the resulting dialog, the email address and license key for the current product will be listed. If you are using an evalution product, the current expiration date of the 14-day evaluation period will be listed instead.

Your license covers one complete major version. For instance, if you bought a license for version 1.1, you will be able to use all versions up to 1.9. If we introduce 2.0 within 60 days of your purchase, we will issue you a new license for this version that will be valid through 2.9.

When SigmaTerm starts and is unlicensed, it will ask for you to enter your key. You can also select "Enter License Key..." from the SigmaTerm menu to do this any time after the initial start. You can visit this page for more information and screen shots showing the license entry.

An SSH identity is used to identify you to remote systems. These identities can be used in two ways:

1, With an appropriate SSH Agent, you are able to securely log in to a remote system either without a password, or to use a single password for multiple systems. This is the primary use.

2, A remote system can be sure that you are who you say you are.

You can generate an identity by using the Generate identity menu item. After generation, a part of the identity file called the public key must be copied to the remote server and put in the appropriate place. See What do I need to do with my public key?

Normally, these files are stored in your home directory in the hidden directory .ssh. The names of the individual files can vary depending on the key types used for generation. For DSA keys, the private key file is named id_dsa and the public portion is id_dsa.pub. Similarly, for RSA v2 keys, the files id_rsa and is_rsa.pub are used, and for RSA v1, they are identity and identity.pub.

An SSH agent is a program that reads your public and private keys, and automatically unlocks them all for ready use. Normally, your private keys are protected by a password that must be entered before use. An agent will read these and using a password stored in your keychain, allow their use without further user intervention. Popular and free OS X SSH agents are SSHKeychain and SSH Agent.

The public key files (id_dsa.pub, id_rsa.pub, or identity.pub) need copied to the remote server before they can be used. For UNIX systems, these are normally appended to a file in the user's home directory, named variously authorized_keys2 or authorized_keys in the hidden .ssh directory.

A fingerprint is a relatively small representation of a key. Fingerprints are used to allow humans to compare two keys (or remote system signatures) without having to visually compare the very large keys that are used by SSH. This normally comes into play when a host key changes, and you are asked to verify that the new fingerprint matches the host.

SigmaTerm supports the XTerm or VT200-style mouse reporting and interaction. This allows software with the appropriate support to use your mouse in character-based applications.

Mouse support can be activated in XTerm, Linux, VT220, VT320, and VT420 emulations. Lots of software, however, restricts it use to terminals using XTerm.

This could have an unlimited number of answers. First, check to make sure you're in one of the emulations specified above. next, check to make sure you see the mouse icon turned on in the status toolbar item. If this is missing, your application has not requested mouse mode to be turned on. Lots of software requires the terminal emulation be set to XTerm for mouse mode to activate. Furthermore, some software (like emacs and vi) need to have special parameters set for mouse mode to become active.

If you log into your Mac using SigmaTerm, you can try the text-mode web browser elinks. Just run elinks http://www.cnn.com. Most 10.5 Macs have this installed. On Linux, try Midnight Commander (mc), or emacs (issue M-x xterm-mouse-mode to activate it.)

In normal operation, right clicking in the terminal window will cause a small pop-up menu to appear, allowing you to copy and paste text. However, when mouse mode is active, the terminal will report right click events through the emulator and will effectively disable the right click. If you don't want this behavior, you can disable mouse mode by unchecking "Use XTerm-style mouse control" on the Display page of the settings dialog.

And one more thing that's tripped up the best of us - if your right click isn't working, check to make sure it's enabled in the Mouse Preference Pane. It should be listed as Secondary Mouse Button.

Since no modern Mac (nor many modern PCs) come equipped with serial ports, you'll need to purchase a USB to Serial adapter. We recommend the Keyspan USA-19HS.

SigmaTerm will support any adapter that has drivers for your Mac. Fortunately, there are a lot of them on the market these days. However, some are better at certain tasks than others. For example, the absolute most common problem with these adapters is some become "flakey" at very high speeds and tend to drop characters.

The best one we've used in house has been the Keyspan USA-19HS which has been very reliable through 230,000 bps.

Set your terminal to XTerm.

Use the Local connection type. It opens a shell directly on your Mac.

OS X comes complete with Terminal.app. This is a basic terminal program that is usually used for running command line programs within OS X. It does a good job of XTerm and VT series emulations for most tasks.

Terminal.app is limited, however, to utilizing ssh and telnet from the command line, and cannot do serial communications. You're also unable to perform file transfers, most transparent print jobs, and support lots of ANSI variations (SCO-ANSI for one.)

In addition, if you need to use WYSE, TeleVideo (TVI), SCO-ANSI, IBM-31xx, or TN3270/5250, you're flat out of luck.

From wikipedia: In linguistics and computer science it is used to refer to the set of symbols that form an alphabet. Something very important for terminal emulations.

Well ... yeah. But we hate the logo looking like a sign on a frat house.