I just realized I read a previous line of yours too quickly. I read "Both of the iTerm pass the preliminary VTTEST suites..." as "Both iTerm and Terminal.app pass...", which I couldn't get to fit with the fact that Terminal.app fail on DECCOLM. Oh well. My fault. Just ran VTTEST against the (admittedly old, the version has great code page support for PC / ANSI BBF 8-bit characters and other weird things I need occasionally) iTerm and it broke a lot more than Terminal.app.. Might install latest version of iTerm and run that as well. But as I said, I have not come across any show stopping bugs in my use of Terminal.app, so until I do, I'll probably stick with it. PS: iTerm couldn't display Arabic ligatures either :) PPS: Arabic is a pain in the ass frankly, to write - each letter has up to FOUR versions, depending on its position in the word (initial, medial, final, by itself) and depending on the letter, it can either connect to previous and next letter or JUST the previous, which means that the next letter has to use the INITIAL form even though it's in the middle of a word... It takes the average student about 5 weeks to figure this out. Don't get me started on the short vowel pointing system (long vowel are indicated by consonants (!) and you just have to know from context whether something is read as a YA or a long I sound), feminine nouns using Ta Marbuta (urgh) or Tanween (diacritics used to mark adverbs). It's an insane writing system all in all, but I love it for some reason..:)