tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) (03/07/91)
From the keyboard of mayoff@cs.utexas.edu (Robert Mayoff):
:>From the keyboard of pete@TIRS.oz.au (Peter Bartel):
:>:I want to be able to resize an OpenWindows shelltool/cmdtool in
:>:which I'm running vi (on SunOS 4.1). A crude fix would be sufficient
:>:such as:
:>: 1 resize the window
:>: 2 quit vi
:>: 3 restart vi at the same location in the file from where I quit
:
:In article <1991Mar06.034658.17775@convex.com> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
:>Your vi should catch the SIGWINCH and recompute your screen size.
:>You shouldn't ahve to do anything.
:
:The problem is that SunOS vi does not support SIGWINCH.
What an act of monumental stupidity!!! They switch from a BSD vi to a SysV
one (which is pretty dumb -- think where vi came from and who wrote it)
and they lose the ability to handle window size changes. Plus it no
longer respects $TERMCAP. I'm sure they won't back down on the
2nd one cause they're weasels, but if they don't fix the window thing,
they don't give a damn about their customers.
--tom
--
I get so tired of utilities with arbitrary, undocumented,
compiled-in limits. Don't you?
Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchristguy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (03/09/91)
>What an act of monumental stupidity!!! They switch from a BSD vi to a SysV >one (which is pretty dumb -- think where vi came from and who wrote it) >and they lose the ability to handle window size changes. Nice rant, but unfortunately, it doesn't match reality: 1) the ability to handle window size changes was removed from the *B*S*D* version of "vi" by Sun, not from the S5 version. The switch from a BSD "vi" to a System V "vi" had nothing to do with that; had we made the BSD handle window size changes *properly* (which, as I've noted, the BSD version does *NOT* do), we would have folded that change into the S5 "vi", just as we folded the other bug fixes, and the "tag stack" stuff, into the S5 "vi". 2) the reason Sun switched to the S5 version of "vi" was that the latter version can cope with 8-bit character sets, while the BSD version can't, and a large amount of ugly surgery would have been involved in an attempt to fix up the BSD version. Yes, there *are* people who want "vi" to handle 8-bit characters; in a recent posting in one of the "comp.unix.*" groups, somebody asked whether there was any way to get their "vi" to do so. (The fact that it also supported "set showmode" was a nice bonus; yes, people had complained about the lack of *that* as well in the previous SunOS "vi".) As for "where 'vi' came from and who wrote it", well, "who wrote it" wasn't *at* Berkeley any more, and hadn't been there for a while, and hadn't had anything to do with "vi" for a while. I agree, it would have been *wonderful* to have stuck our esteemed Vice President for Research and Development in a room and said "you're not leaving this room until you 1) fix up the other guy's botch in implementing SIGWINCH handling in "vi" and 2) make the damn thing handle 8-bit character sets", but somehow, I don't think that would have been possible....