dave (11/13/82)
I'm looking for smart-terminal, screen-oriented software to get out of the line-by-line tty age. Our user community consists of a relatively large percentage of non-computerniks for whom menus and page-oriented output would be particularly useful. Essentially, most of these folks need to have all of their options spelled out in front of them. Of course we have "vi" and "curses." But it would be nice to have things such as: 1. A menu manager, compiler, or interpreter. This might alternatively be a set of C routines at a higher level than "curses" that would manage menus in much the same way "curses" manages screens. Perhaps better would be a program like "awk" that is oriented towards menu generation, or even a menu language. A simple example application would be a menu selection for text processing: selecting the output device, input files, various preprocessors, etc. Another example would be managing information in a "refer" database. 2. A two-way two terminal conversation program (like "write") that allows simultaneous typing to occur on both terminals. It might divide the screen on both terminals in half--each terminal "owning" one half the screen on the other terminal. I've seen such programs on other systems. 3. A screen-oriented interface to a shell (preferably csh) that's like the window facilities of bit-map processors such as the Alto, Sun, Apollo, or BBN. This would allow you to partition your screen into "windows," each window owned by a different process. E.g., you could have program A running and producing output on the left of the screen and and program B doing something else on the right. The above list is not exhaustive, but presents the flavor of what I'm looking for. I'd appreciate any pointers, comments, hints, suggestions, etc. As is traditional, advance thanks. Dave Furchtgott ...!ihps3!ihldt!ll1!!sb1!mb2b!uofm-cv!dave