jafischer@lion.UUCP (10/10/87)
[] Many of you may have been intrigued by the ad in START for the VSH Manager, from Beckemeyer Development Tools. I finally received the product in the mail last week, so here are my first impressions. I'll start with a description. The VSH Manager is a fairly powerful addition to the MT C-Shell system. It consists of both an accessory -- called, if I remember correctly, MultiView? -- and the main GEM program, which replaces the old 'init2.prg'. The accessory allows you to open up multiple 'TOS windows' (I don't remember if that's the term that BDT uses), which are GEM windows, into which are piped all of the stdiin/out from a given task. The windows may be resized, resulting in text output being clipped to the new window size. Yes, as you may guess, the overhead involved, coupled with GEM's inherent slowness, makes this a fairly slow system as far as text output is concerned. To alleviate this slowness, the VSH Manager main program (initvsh.prg) has a menu item called 'RUN TOS,' as well as 'RUN GEM.' With the first, you may run a TOS program, which then grabs the whole screen for itself. Text speed is then normal. However, you are then stuck with one task, without the ability to bring up any MultiView windows. You will want to run any TOS-based editors using RUN TOS, since anything that uses VT-52 escape codes to clear the screen, etc, won't work in these TOS windows. Basically, the TOS windows are for compiling, grepping, ls-ing, and anything else that simply prints to stdout and stderr. I was really hoping that VSH would _somehow_ clip the VT-52 escape codes so that, for instance, 'clear screen' would only clear the window area. Oh well. (Plea: could someone add a simple GEM menu and an evnt_multi() call to Micro Emacs? I may try to do it myself, when I get 3.9a, whenever it shows up.) If you select RUN GEM, then, of course, you still have the MultiView accessory available. From within, say, CAD 3-D, or Flash, or 1st Word, etc., you can call up a MultiView window, start a task going in it, and close the window. The task then continues executing merrily in the background. Okay, now the reservations: with 1 Meg, about all you could do in the Multiview windows would be things like ls, more, grep, perhaps a tiny communications program, etc. Forget about compiling or making, I'd guess. I had about a 100K ramdisk when I tried, since I don't have a hard drive; so with the full 1 Meg of ram free, perhaps you could do a compile. However, the MT C-Shell is notorious for producing very small holes in memory that can divide your largest free space in half, for instance. David claims that these are produced by TOS, and I believe him. Too bad he doesn't just rewrite TOS altogether while he's at it :-). The package claims that a hard drive is necessary, and this is definitely true, unless you had, say, 4 Megs of RAM and had a large enough ramdisk set up. To summarize: if you like multitasking (and I still like the Micro C-Shell the best, I must admit), and have the necessary hardware, you may be interested. All in all it will run you about $100-$150 US for the system, but if I had 4 Megs and a hard drive, I know I'd be using this thing constantly. However, I used to work at a computer store, and got the MT C-Shell dirt cheap (we had the original buggy version that just didn't sell), so I thought I'd try out this VSH. I don't know if I'd run out and spend the list price (or a reasonable discount) on the whole shebang. Unfortunately, I can't warn you about any glaring bugs, since I don't have the proper configuration to really give it a go. It did seem to do what it was supposed to, when I ran it on the Mega ST4. Perhaps, if someone with a hard drive and/or more RAM does buy the package, they would like to post their impressions after using it extensively. -- - Jonathan A. Fischer jafischer@lion.waterloo.edu
gsender@rmi.UUCP (Gerd Sender) (10/16/87)
I had no problems to use the MicroEmacs 3.7 and LESS within a window. All escape codes worked well. Perhaps you tried it with MicroEmacs 3.8, if so I suppose that it is caused, because ME3.8 uses the BIOS call directly instead of the 'official' GEMDOS call. This makes redirection impossible.