z (06/07/82)
The recent long discussion on net.news points out one of the major deficiencies of the "more" program, namely that it is rather inflexible. Other problems with it include its noticeable overhead as a separate process, as well as the fact that it must be invoked explicitly most of the time. All of these problems are solved by moving the basic functions of the "more" command into the tty driver, which is what I did here a year and a half ago. The code is very simple and very small; it makes the existing XON/XOFF code do most of the work for it. My current implementation is for 4.1BSD, but I believe that the identical code should work for 4.0BSD. I wouldn't expect that it would take too many changes to make it work for V7 or System III. I am posting "diff -c"'s of the affected modules to net.sources. Two new ioctl's have been added, and stty has also been changed so you can say "stty page" and "stty -page". The login program has also been changed to turn on page mode by defualt, which is what everybody seems to like. It's automatically turned off during RAW and CBREAK mode, so you don't have to worry about editors and such. A diff for the stty(1) and tty(4) manual pages is also included.