info-vax@ucbvax.UUCP (11/26/85)
From: iwm@icdoc.UUCP Subject: Screen Manager Expires: References: Sender: Reply-To: iwm@icdoc.UUCP (Ian Moor) Followup-To: Distribution: Organization: Dept. of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK. Keywords: Does anybody know DEC's policy regarding the screen manager (SMG$...) Its a fine way of supporting terminals, but are they going to use it? I wish that TPU used it - does anybody know why not ? I guess that half of TPU must be a re-implementation of SMG for ANSII only terminals. What about SCRFT/SCRSHR ? I recall that somebody talked about making SCRFT call SMG, the problem seems to be making SCRSHR think the terminal is an FTn rather than a type recognised by SMG, it seems possible but would require a patch to SCRSHR. Does anybody have a list of which programs use: a) Hard coded escape sequences (ick!) b) SCRFT c) SMG
Provan@LLL-MFE.ARPA (11/27/85)
TPU doesn't use SMG$ for several reasons: 1. They were ahead of SMG$ development. 2. They had to make it effecient or the project would get scrapped. 2a. TPU has more knowledge about what's been changed on the screen than the more general SMG$ would, so they can update faster. 3. If it supported foreign terminals they wouldn't be able to sell as many of their overpriced, underfunctioned VT100s. In fairness, though, future releases of TPU are supposed to support SMG$ terminals by using the SMG$ data base, so although they won't actually be using SMG$ to print the screen, they should be able to support foreign SMG$ terminals. The utilities I've found that seem to use SMG$ are VMSmail and the debugger. Both have amusing reactions if you try to run them with a ScrFt style foreign terminal. VMSmail just chokes and exits. The debugger chokes, flushes typeahead, but then continues to run. My biggest complaint about SMG$ is that it tries to map all terminals into a VT100. For example, my terminal has insert/delete line, but not scrolling regions. VT100s have the reverse. SMG$ makes no effort to provide scrolling region support for terminals with only insert/delete line, even though it's not too difficult. But since it is some extra effort, they won't do it, making SMG$ virtually useless for those terminals. On the other end of the scale, there are terminals which are muchc more sophisticate than the VT line. Some have common concept, such as more memory for display than what goes on the screen. I don't expect DEC to support such things, but that's still what you have to do if you're really serious about supporting foreign terminals. What I see so far is "we'll support any terminal at all, as long as it emulates VT100s." I just wish they have a few people somewhere in development with some foreign terminals. This BS in 4.2 that means I have to switch back and forth between a ScrFt terminal and a SMG$ terminal to run Monitor or VMSMail is absurd. I'd be embarrassed (unless, I suppose, what I really wanted was to discourage people from buying non-DEC terminals). provan@lll-mfe.arpa
McGuire_Ed@GRINNELL.MAILNET (12/04/85)
The SHOW CLUSTER utility uses SMG$. MONITOR doesn't. My guess is that SMG$ will be used for new applications. Except, of course, for those that don't do windows...