AbsoluteTelnet is a terminal emulator supporting Telnet, SSH and serial protocols. It has flexible configuration options allowing compatibility with most legacy operating systems and environments. AbsoluteTelnet offers the unique option of a tabbed interface for multiple connections.

Web Site

The home page for AbsoluteTelnet is http://www.celestialsoftware.net/. You may also find a link from there to download the current version of AbsoluteTelnet.

Overview

AbsoluteTelnet supports a variety of customizations allowing the display to be configured to the user's personal taste. This includes:

• Screen size (number of rows and columns) including full-screen mode
• Font size
• Background and font color
• Enable or disable the bell character

Other features supported include:

• Tabbed interface
• Output logging
• Scroll-back buffer
• Printer support

AbsoluteTelnet is available in three versions

• Demo version (free) - all features are enabled, but it is time limited to 5 minutes per session
• Lite version (free) - no limits on time, but support for SSH is disabled
• Professional version - full support for all features

Communication

AbsoluteTelnet provides 5 basic communication protocols.

• Raw - simple terminal communication without the Telnet negotiation of features and detecting of terminal type
• Telnet - standard Telnet protocol used for terminal communication with most systems. All data on the network is in plain-text which could be viewed by anyone with a network sniffer between the PC and the target server.
• Rlogin - execution of single commands and displaying the results
• SSH - an encrypted implementation of communication similar to Telnet. All communication cannot be viewed while on the network. AbsoluteTelnet includes support for SSH tunnels.
• Modem - dialup through a modem
• Serial - user specified COM port and communication parameters

If the Telnet connection is going through a firewall that drops idle connections, a communication parameter may be set to send keepalive messages regularly to prevent the connection from being dropped.

Keyboard Mapping

Due to the diferences between the DEC VT series keyboards and the standard, and some not-so-standard, PC keyboards, terminal emulators must choose how to map many of the function and editing keys. By default, the backspace key is mapped to the DEC delete key.

The 6 editing keys on the VT series keyboards are:

Find	Insert	Remove
Select	Previous	Next

These keys are mapped to standard PC keyboard for these keys is:

Insert	Home	Page Up
Delete	End	Page Down

AbsoluteTelnet maps these keys based on function.This is useful when the user is not so familiare with the placement of the DEC VT keys, or when using a laptop or other keyboard which may not have these keys with the standard placement. This maps the PC keys to the DEC VT keys as:

• Insert -> Insert
• Home -> Find
• Page Up -> Previous
• Delete -> Remove
• End -> Select
• Page Down -> Next

AbsoluteTelnet provides multiple terminal emulation modes; including VT52, VT100, VT220, VT320, ansi, xterm, qnx, scoansi, ANSIBBS and WYSE60. They keypad mapping is a close emulation of the Digital terminals. The function keys higher than F12 do not exist on the PC keyboard and are not emulated well.