JBROOKSHIRE@USC-ECLB@sri-unix (12/17/82)
Folks, Using DEC EDT screen editor with keypad on VT100s, under vms3.0, and wish we could do as well with some of our other existing terminals. Does anyone have/know of either generalized drivers, or specific stuff for ADM42, HP2644A/2648A terminals, or Televideo 925/950 up w/modem programs, that would let VAX treat them like screens? Appreciate any help. Best, Jerry -------
bcw (12/18/82)
From: Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University
Re: VAX/VMS screen editors
I have a foreign terminal package for VAX/VMS which hooks into the VMS
screen package and which does a pretty good job for ADM's and HP's, which
I would be willing to let go of (no guarantees about bug fixes etc).
Now for the bad news - EDT does not use the VMS screen package. At all.
Therefore you can't even use the non-keypad version of the screen editor
available under EDT, on non-DEC terminals. I have suggested to DEC that
they at least have EDT use the VMS screen package for output so that the
non-keypad screen mode on EDT would work, but DEC doesn't seem to be too
eager to do this.
There are some other places to look for screen editors for VMS:
1) You could hack up a version of the VTEDIT TECO macro which would
handle non-DEC terminals. Probably this would be a lot of trouble
since the VTEDIT macro 'calls' functions inside TECO which know
about the DEC terminals ... of course, you could modify TECO if
you don't mind hacking a lot of badly-written assembler code ...
And then TECO macros (especially of this size) aren't too easy
to write anyway. And to add insult to injury, the result would
probably prove a real CPU hog on the VAX.
2) You could get something like Eunice or Unity which will run the
VI editor from Berkeley under your VMS system. It seems to work
reasonably well - I use it on my hp2648 all the time.
3) You could get something like the MASS11 word processing system
which has support for non-DEC terminals. Some of these are
pretty nice - we looked at MASS-11 but decided against it not
so much because it wouldn't do what we wanted (it's a very nice
word processing system) but because it was too expensive to
justify considering the amount of word processing which takes
place on our VAX. Other systems are also available.
Hope this is of some use and/or interest ...
Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University