roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (08/01/88)
I'm sort of new to NeWS, so maybe I'm just doing something wrong,
but it looks to me that psterm is pretty much a disaster. Aside from the
fact that it's slow as hell, most of the terminal emulations don't seem to
work. The h19 works the best, but still has some bugs (ocassionally it
jumps into underline mode and often leaves garbage characters on the
screen). All the other terminal types (vt100, sun, etc) seem not to work at
all when I try using (terminfo-based) CCA emacs. The "scrolling prototype"
(nterm?) works better as far as getting the right stuff in the right place
on the screen goes, but it's even slower than psterm; I can work about as
fast on my 2400-baud dial-up!
So, what should I do about a NeWS terminal emulator? Is there some
other termcap and/or terminfo entry which will make psterm work right with
more than 24 lines? Is there some hope that nterm will be faster in the
next release (and I mean at least twice as fast, in order to make it
reasonably useful)?
--
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (08/02/88)
Terminal emulators are one of NeWS's big holes now. We at the Grasshopper
Group have been working on psterm, and it is now much better. If you
were at Usenix, we demoed a mid-life version of it there. It can be set
for any font, font size, # rows, or # columns. It can either stretch the
font, or the #rows/cols, when you resize the window. It has an optional
scroll bar. It slices, it dices, it writes bad checks.
We also clarified the client source copyright with Sun so that we could
post it to the net. We're interested in making NeWS more of a viable
window system -- nobody will buy our Mac A/UX version if NeWS loses in the
general market, after all.
The code is currently being tested and packaged up, and it will go into
the comp.sources.unix queue when it works and is easy to install. We hope
that you won't be happy with that version, but will hack it and slash it
and send it back to us for an updated reposting; it's work in progress,
not an artistic jewel, and in particular the user interface needs work.
Eric Messick did the changes, with kibbutzing from me and Hugh Daniel.
There are some things that are hard to fix given psterm's structure.
Psterm is a "termcap interpreter" -- everything it knows about a
terminal comes from the terminal's termcap entry. If your program
knows more about VT100's than what the termcap entry says, there will
be escape sequences that psterm cannot figure out. If your terminfo
description is more complete than your termcap description, ditto. Our
version of psterm defaults to emulating the "psterm" terminal, which
*no* programs know funny things about. We provide termcap and terminfo
descriptions for the "psterm" terminal, which match exactly, and which are
optimized for use with psterm.
If you have made bugfixes to NeWS 1.1's psterm, please send them to me;
we will try to merge them into the comp.sources.unix posting, to make
everyone's life easier.
--
John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com
"And if there's danger don't you try to overlook it,
Because you knew the job was dangerous when you took it"rminnich@super.ORG (Ronald G Minnich) (08/02/88)
In article <3411@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > > I'm sort of new to NeWS, so maybe I'm just doing something wrong, >but it looks to me that psterm is pretty much a disaster. Aside from the No, you're right, psterm is a disaster. So is nterm, the newer replacement. I say nterm is a disaster cause while using it i spent most of my time waiting for it to echo what i had typed. Two weeks of that sh*t and i finally gave up on NeWS, for now. Kinda sad, i really like NeWS, but the only tool that works is the clock. If you are going to have a windows system it really ought to have a terminal emulator to start .... Some good guys from another company have told me that a real psterm will show up on comp.sources.unix soon; hope real soon, as i can not use NeWS till it appears. The thing that gets me is this is NeWS1.1; i can't imagine what 1.0 was like. Does 1.1 == beta-release version 1? If this is the X-11 competition it is going to need more work! ron P.S. Well, i don't know what you can do, but i am back in SunTools.