sqrkl@csvax.liv.ac.uk (07/13/88)
In article <14243@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>, kennel@minnie.cognet.ucla.edu (Matthew Kennel) writes: > > I quote from the INSTALL file of our gnu emacs distribution: [lots of Emacs twaddle deleted] I think the designers of Emacs are the ones who are brain-damaged. Leaving aside the fact that their editor is one big joke to those who like using PROPER editors, XON-XOFF is now the de facto standard for flow control and any terminal (or emulator) not supporting XON-XOFF should NOT be used. I make no guarantees about my terminal emulator being able to handle output at 9600 baud without XON/XOFF because I have assumed that people are intelligent to know that even a true VT100 can't keep up at that sort of speed (esp. with smooth scrolling on !). Richard K. Lloyd, ****** This is a VAX 11/780 running VAX/VMS V4.5 ****** Computer Science Dept., * JANET : SQRKL@UK.AC.LIV.CSVAX * Liverpool University, * UUCP : {backbone}!mcvax!ukc!mupsy!liv-cs!SQRKL * Merseyside, England, * Internet : SQRKL%csvax.liv.ac.uk@cunyvm.cuny.edu * Great Britain. ******************************************************* "My opinions and those of the University of Liverpool are completely unrelated, so I'M THE CULPRIT if you feel offended by the above message - I just can't help moaning about Atari STs, PCs or clones, U**X, C, IBM mainframes, the list is endless..."
kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman) (07/14/88)
In article <4197@csvax.liv.ac.uk> sqrkl@csvax.liv.ac.uk writes: >I think the designers of Emacs are the ones who are brain-damaged. >Leaving aside the fact that their editor is one big joke to those who >like using PROPER editors, XON-XOFF is now the de facto standard for >flow control and any terminal (or emulator) not supporting XON-XOFF >should NOT be used. I think the Eflamers have lost sight of the fact that Emacs is an outgrowth of a series of editors originally written at MIT and Stanford, for systems that had large keyboards with REAL Control- and Meta- keys, that did not require multiple keystroke sequences to send (the characters were 10-bits wide -- the high three bits were shift-control-meta). Emacs was an attempt to provide the same functionality on brain-damaged i/o devices. REAL terminals have direct video connections and WIDE keyboard paths. All the rest is an approximation. Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu)
s30780a@puukko.HUT.FI (Johan Myreen) (07/17/88)
In article <4197@csvax.liv.ac.uk> sqrkl@csvax.liv.ac.uk writes: >I think the designers of Emacs are the ones who are brain-damaged. >Leaving aside the fact that their editor is one big joke to those who >like using PROPER editors, XON-XOFF is now the de facto standard for >flow control and any terminal (or emulator) not supporting XON-XOFF >should NOT be used. So what is your definition of a 'PROPER editor'? One that does not use ^S and ^Q as command keys? And while we are talking about 'de facto standards': to me, and probably to a lot of other people, Emacs has become the de facto *standard editor* on all kinds of computers. Emacs happens to make use of control codes, that's what makes it modeless. I think it would be foolish to sacrifice two of the most easily typed control codes to something that can be handled in an other way, and should be hidden from the user anyway. Besides, using ^S to manually stop output from a program isn't very convenient at 9.6+ kbit/s. I find it much better to pipe it through a pager like 'more' or 'less'... > I make no guarantees about my terminal emulator being able to handle >output at 9600 baud without XON/XOFF because I have assumed that people >are intelligent to know that even a true VT100 can't keep up at that >sort of speed (esp. with smooth scrolling on !). A true VT100 isn't the most wonderful terminal in the world, you know. It just happens to be another 'de facto standard'. Why does a VT100 terminal emulator have to emulate even the deficiencies of a true VT100? In particular, why can't the emulators allocate buffers for incoming data that are large enough to hold the characters received while updating the screen. A few kilobytes would probably be enough for normal use; a screen editor does not put out more than that at a time (unless you are e.g. rapidly killing and yanking a large region a few dozen times.) Any terminal emulator that thinks "that's a tough one, I can't handle any more!" when it sees a clear-to-end-of-page escape sequence should NOT be used. > >Richard K. Lloyd, ****** This is a VAX 11/780 running VAX/VMS V4.5 ****** *This* is a MicroVAX II running 4.3 BSD UNIX. I guess you win by 0.2 :-) M-x insert-disclaimer