When it comes to terminal emulation on the Mac, CelView is the veteran, and it runs in OS 8.6 through OS X.

This feature - which allows IBM mainframe and midrange systems to select drawers and envelope feeders on printers attached directly to your Mac - is especially important to remote users who need full IBM printing support when they’re outside of the office. When it comes to IBM host-based printing, PowerTerm includes excellent host print transform capabilities. Second, when you save a configured terminal session for future use, you wind up with four generic icons, none of which can be double-clicked on to open your saved terminal session.

First, PowerTerm gives you no way to transfer files to or from your connected system, a shortcoming that may have you running to a PC or fudging with an FTP program to get the job done. The program includes powerful scripting tools that can capture your keystrokes and save them as macros, but it’s missing a key feature and has an irritating quirk. Using the program’s graphical keyboard editor, you can change keyboard mapping with a simple drag and drop, and PowerTerm supports a wide range of languages. Entering commands is easy you can click on any on-screen menu item to execute the command instead of typing it in a command line. As such, it comes with a quiver full of features that will appeal to users who need to connect to a variety of systems: VT terminals, IBM terminals (both 52), Data General, AIXTERM, WYSE, HP, TANDEM - basically, you name the terminal type, and PowerTerm has it covered. The $150-per-seat, OS X-only PowerTerm comes to the Mac for the first time in this version, ported from a Unix terminal-emulation program of the same name. Two new OS X-native terminal-emulation programs - Ericom’s PowerTerm 1.0 and Celcorp’s CelView 3.0.1 - give your Mac quick access to these powerful systems, and while both work well, neither is a standout. Those systems include everything from Unix and Linux to IBM “Big Iron,” such as the AS/400, and nearly all require that you have some kind of terminal-emulation program to manage and program them. Many of us spend our computing days and nights looking at a shiny Aqua interface, but plenty of people still earn their lunch money staring at screens that look more like DOS than anything remotely graphical.

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