Thomas.Epperly@EDRC.CMU.EDU (03/16/88)
I have been having some trouble using GNU EMACS on a televideo 921 terminal. The problem comes when I use ^N or ^P to scroll the screen (i.e. ^N off the bottom of the page or ^P off the top). The screen gets garbled and it gives me a search failed message when I have not initiated a search myself. Can someone suggest a change to the termcap or something like that? If so I am interested in any suggestions you have. Tom Epperly te07@edrc.cmu.edu or te07@andrew.cmu.edu
jr@PEBBLES.BBN.COM (John Robinson) (03/25/88)
>> It seems that >> the (set-input-mode nil t) doesn't always work because it is evaluated >> before the emacs is dumped. One of the unfortunate parts of the Unix terminal design is that the state manipulated by stty is volatile, and not part of the program (yes, yes, changing this is nowhere near as easy as I just made it sound). So executing this form before dumping won't have any effect on the state your terminal aquires when you restart the dumped emacs. Emacs would need more code to fix this. It copes correctly with terminal state over a suspend (^Z), so it could also in principle do this around a dump. Given the predilection expressed in the files accompanying the GNU emacs distribution, I wouldn't count on this appearing. I would also question whether putting this into a dumped emacs is ever the right thing. Given a choice of modes, as you have with most terminals, raw mode is what emacs prefers. If you insist that your site "default" be cbreak, you are penalizing the users with capable terminals that wish to run in raw mode. So leaving this as a user customization is still, I think, the right thing. Making the information available to users that want the customization is fine, and this news list helps do that (together with the PROBLEMS and INSTALL files). Another possibility would be something like novice that offers to change your default environment (my mucking in your .emacs file) to put in the necessary initialization. Real cute would be detection of ^S^Q pairs in the input at early stages of an emacs session which provoke an automatic novice interaction. Maybe it could all be buried in incremental search in fact. Hmmmmm... /jr