ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) (12/31/90)
In <8797@dog.ee.lbl.gov>, beard@ux5.lbl.gov (Patrick C Beard) mentions as one of his wishes for future improvements to MPW: "Standard I/O: have MPW shell act a lot more like a Unix shell by letting tools do character at a time i/o. This would make interactive tools a lot easier to write. Once in a while this is what you want." Console I/O already works a character at a time on output, and on arbitrary selections on input. I know--you're objecting to the current convention whereby if you hit Enter without a selection, it sends the whole of the line the insertion point is on. That convention is a simple hack to make the shell/editor behave a little more like a console terminal, but it's only a partial solution. And I don't really believe it's worth trying hack the input convention to make it even more elaborate, because I think there's a better approach: use the Comms Toolbox! What you can do is use the Terminal Manager to open a terminal window. This can be a full screen terminal, with cursor addressing, text attributes--the works. You just output a character stream, and the terminal emulation tool takes care of interpreting control characters, escape sequences and all the rest of it. And you can keep a scrollback buffer to save stuff that disappears off the top, so you don't completely lose that particular capability of the MPW editor. As for input, you've got full character-at-a-time control over that. The terminal emulation tool will even translate its own special function keys, and call a routine that you specify to process the resulting input data! Any volunteers to explore this idea, and come up with a package of routines to make it easy to use? Lawrence D'Oliveiro fone: +64-71-562-889 Computer Services Dept fax: +64-71-384-066 University of Waikato electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz Hamilton, New Zealand 37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+13:00 "Whom, me?"