gww@aphasia.UUCP (George Williams) (09/06/85)
> While I'm at it, the terminal is also where history belongs...
Hmph.
I kind of like having history not include all the funny things I typed into
my text editor (how could the terminak know what program it was running?).
I agree that it would be nice to have history built in to every program, but
I want each program to have its own history, not have them all confused
together (which is what I think putting history in the terminal would do,
of course you could build some absurdly smart terminaks which would have
3 or 4 history lists and commands for allocating/freeing/changing them
but this seems extreem).
Also it's kind of nice when I display history not to see things like
21 man greengrocer^Uman 3 grd^Heen^Wsprintf
Are you going to teach the terminal about what my line/word/character deletes
are (how about ^R, does it understand that ^C flushes the input buffer?)
does it understand that on a DEC OS escape is a break character, ^G?
I think there is just too much stuff here for even a smart terminal, or a
PC to deal with, it has to understand the guts of too many OSes to be economicly
feasible, but if you at callan build such a thing I'll be happy to review it
for you...
George Williams
decvax!cit-vax!aphasia!gww
I breath, I spit, I am. But take no further notice
I was merely nodding in.hrp@cray.UUCP (Hal Peterson) (09/11/85)
> > While I'm at it, the terminal is also where history belongs... > Also it's kind of nice when I display history not to see things like > 21 man greengrocer^Uman 3 grd^Heen^Wsprintf > I think there is just too much stuff here for even a smart terminal, or a > PC to deal with, it has to understand the guts of too many OSes to be economicly > feasible . . . > George Williams The easy answer to this is to just make the terminal smart enough to do command line editing locally, which is what IBM 3270s have done (poorly, I admit) for years. Local command-line editing and history would be obvious features to build into Blit software--so obvious that I'll bet somebody out there already has. Any takers? Hal Peterson ihnp4!stolaf!umn-cs!cray!hrp
tim@cithep.UucP (Tim Smith ) (09/12/85)
> Are you going to teach the terminal about what my line/word/character deletes
Well, actually, yes! Besides being where pagination and history belong, the
terminal is also where the high level functions of the terminal driver belong.
--
unlk a6
rts
Tim Smith
ihnp4!{wlbr!callan,cithep}!timhenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (09/12/85)
> ... Local command-line editing and > history would be obvious features to build into Blit software--so > obvious that I'll bet somebody out there already has. Any takers? You are behind the times; Rob Pike (co-inventor of the Blit) talked about this at the Salt Lake City Usenix. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
wcs@ho95e.UUCP (Bill.Stewart.4K435.x0705) (09/16/85)
> > ... Local command-line editing and > > history would be obvious features to build into Blit software--so > > obvious that I'll bet somebody out there already has. Any takers? > You are behind the times; Rob Pike (co-inventor of the Blit) talked > about this at the Salt Lake City Usenix. > Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology > {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry If all you want to edit is command-lines and history, get ksh! It works just as well on dumb terminals as smart ones, and you can do editing with vi-style or emacs-style commands. If you like (boring) csh-style history, there's also an equivalent for that, but the one-line-screen-editor approach to history and command editing is a lot classier. What's nice to be able to do from an intelligent terminal is grab *anything* off the screen, edit it a bit, and send it back to the system. (Actually, my long-since-replaced HP2621 could do that; the ENTER key was great for snarfing up output from programs that died, ed-ing it into a file, and printing it out. The arrow keys were too brain-damaged to use with the host, but they were great for local editing.) Bill -- ## Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs