karn (06/08/82)
Another advantage I forgot to mention with my paging program: since the screen is cleared for each page and never scrolls, you can start reading the text as soon as it starts coming out at the top of the screen. Trying to read netnews as it scrolls up your screen at 2 lines/second is guaranteed to give you eyestrain (especially at 3AM when you're catching up on fa.poli-sci or fa.arms-d in order to overcome insomnia...) Phil
steveg (06/08/82)
Page mode would be a good option to add to the readnews program. Following scrolling 1200 baud text is a good way to cause eyestrain. The Human Factor's people at WANG have done a lot of studies on scroll mode terminals. They concluded that the jitter and flashing was causing eye-strain and increased neverousness of the users (see, I can't even type straight anymore!) All of Wang's editors are page mode, not scroll mode. This doesn't sound like a hard thing to support on terminals that could support it. - Steven Gutfreund
steveg (06/08/82)
On re-reading the MORE manual, I noted that a style of page mode display is available. But I still feel that the screen is still to busy and distracting if one erases the lines one by one. Better still would be the style of page mode display that was suggested: erase the whole screen, and display line by line. (19.2K is too much to expect, unfortunately) - Steven Gutfreund
mark (06/08/82)
Checking your 4.1BSD more(1) manual page more closely, you'll discover there is a link to more called "page" which clears the screen after each screenfull. If that's what you want, use it. Mark
egb (06/08/82)
Have the folks at WANG also looked into the smooth scroll crt's like the vt100? Does that also produce eyestrain? (Some of this discussion wouldn't be going on if everyone used notesfiles.)
dmmartindale (06/08/82)
Note that in 4.1BSD, putting "setenv MORE p" in your .login will cause "more" to clear the screen between pages rather than scrolling whenever it is invoked, including during readnews. This is invaluable with terminals like Ann Arbors with very long persistence phosphors.