Okay, since I last wrote (typed?) about my quest for the perfect terminal set up, things have gone astray. I now find that I can happy run one X11 application with no problems at all. If I fire up a second one I start to get a problem a short while latter. I noticed that after a little while with aterm and Xemacs open together the fan on my powerbook, cut in. checking the processor load using the very funky (and handy!) widget known as IPulse, I find that I have a copy of tcsh taking 85 to 90% of processor time!
This second copy of the shell is associated with the instance of Xemacs, I'm runinng (the first shell is there for aterm). This is not too much of a problem, but it dose mean I get less life from the battery, thanks to the design of OSX, I don't notice any real slowdown. Perhaps a more major problem is that this other shell doesn't go away once I quit Xemacs, the only way to get rid of the pesky thing is to do kill -9. Also the problem isn't limited to Xemacs, it happens with an X11 application.
The odd thing is that I can run several copies of tcsh outside of X11 with no problems?
I'm guessing it's something to do with the start up files for tcsh which include a file to set up support for fink applications, I need this to run since all my X11 applications are from the fink collection! Maybe this script is run each time X11 runs, but terminal (or iterm as I'm currently using) doesn't run the shell as a login shell, so it inherits the environment. More research is needed, but for the moment, I'm back to using iterm and a native port of emacs. Hu hum.