bolyard@fortune.UUCP (10/11/83)
I am looking for a terminal designed for a (unix) programmer. It is an
otherwise ordinary ASCII non-block-mode terminal with the following features:
1. A screen buffer at least two pages long, giving the programmer the ability
to "scroll back" and see stuff that has scrolled off the top of the screen.
2. Real "user programmable softkeys". That is, keys whose output can actually
be altered at the terminal, either by typing directly into a built-in menu
screen, or by listing a file of commands from the host, ala HP2645.
3. A 24 x 80 format (of course).
4. Local editing functions, i.e. those that do not send any data to the host,
such as "insert line", "delete line", "insert character", "delete char",
arrow keys that move the cursor about the screen.
5. At least one alternate video attribute, like bright or dim or reverse, that
does NOT take up a space on the screen to activate or deactivate.
6. Non-destructive backspace.
(So far this may sound very much like a Hewlett Packard 264x type terminal,
but wait, there's more !! )
7. THIS IS THE FEATURE THAT MAKES THE *BIG* DIFFFERENCE !!
It needs a key which, when pressed, causes the character on the screen
underneath the cursor (that is, at the cursor's present position) to
be sent to the host, as if it had just been typed!
This key, which I wil call the "duplicate character" or "dup char" key,
eliminates much retyping!! Imagine typing a long command string, only to
discover (just before hitting return) that the first character was wrong !
With this key, you just backspace to the character in error, retype it,
and then press the dup char key until you have effectively retyped the
entire line. Or, if you left out a character from the third parameter,
just backspace to the spot, press insert character - which causes the
rest of the chars on that line to get pushed right one char for each
depression - type the missing character, and "dup char" for the rest of
the line.
Usefull variations on this key are "DUP WORD" which repeatedly does
"dup char" until the next blank, and "DUP TO END OF LINE" which lets
the programmer avoid having to hold down the "dup char" key a lot.
8. When the TAB key is pressed, the terminal should issue 1 to n ASCII
space characters, until it has positioned the cursor at the next tab
stop. Likewise, BACKTAB should issue some number of backspaces.
Okay, it probably sounds like I'm dreaming right ?? After all, with the
tens (hundreds ?) of terminal manufacturers out there, it doesn't make
sense that one of them should produce a usefull product...
But seriously, My former employer, a Burroughs subsidiary in Michigan,
actually reprogrammed visual 400's to work like this, and every programmer
had one on his/her desk. It was great !! But unfortunately, only for
their internal use, so I couldn't get one.
Surely somebody has seen, or at least heard of, such a wonderful
beast. Please mail your response to me at the following UUCP mail address:
..!decvax!decwrl!amd70!fortune!bolyard
Sincerely, Nelson Bolyard ..!fortune!bolyardthomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas) (10/12/83)
Only 24x80! What a loss! I can't live with that few. Get more than two emacs windows on the screen, and you've only got 5 or 6 lines/window. As long as you're dreaming, what's wrong with 40 or 60 lines? Think big! I find the csh history mechanism, together with the 'redo' alias (lets you edit the last command in your fav editor) totally sufficient to deal with mistakes in typing, and it's so much more powerful - you can repeat and modify previous commands as well, even if they have scrolled off the screen. =Spencer
nazgul@apollo.UUCP (Kee Hinckley) (10/12/83)
It seems to me what you people need is an Apollo. Then you have mulitple "screens" where you define the size, and when something goes off the top you can always scroll back and nab it, or edit it, or copy it elsewhere, or put it in a file...
tjt@kobold.UUCP (T.J.Teixeira) (10/14/83)
Use an entire Apollo just as a *terminal*!! Come on, give me a break! All the features you describe our unquestionably useful, but the price is exhorbitant for just a terminal. As a workstation, OK, but I presume that if the original requestor wanted a workstation, he would have asked for one.
israel@umcp-cs.UUCP (10/15/83)
I like the 'csh' history mechanism also, but I have one problem with
it (but I don't think it's easily fixable). The lab I work in is
air-conditioned (aren't they all) and always very cold. When I've
been working for a long time, my coordination suffers from the cold.
When that happens, I tend to miss the <CR> key and hit <DEL> instead
which discards all queued input on the line. This is really
frustrating because the line was never executed, and isn't put into the
history list, so I can't redo it, but must retype the whole line over
again (a real pain when it was a long command).
--
~~~ Bruce ~~~
Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland
{rlgvax,seismo}!umcp-cs!israel (Usenet) israel.umcp-cs@Udel-Relay (Arpanet)bhaskar@fluke.UUCP (K.S. Bhaskar) (10/15/83)
You can get what you want with *almost* any terminal, if you use a human interface (like emacs) that assumes that your human interface is a video display unit and not a hard-copy device (like sh or csh). You can customize your human interface to your heart's content with an arbitrary number of previous pages. You can even lay out your keyboard differently if should so desire. Of course, what you need is a real window manager as your human interface, but, unfortunately, our favorite operating system lacks (a) dynamic linking and (b) classes / modules / objects which makes it somewhat inconvenient, though not impossible, to write such a human interface with any degree of efficiency. Yes, 24x80 is for the birds, but, since I have trouble getting my employer to buy me something better, at least I can have L-A-R-G-E buffer into which I can stuff program output and look at it. I am a born-again emacsimize-your-productivity believer!!! -- K.S. Bhaskar (John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, Washington)