guy (02/14/83)
OK, but: 1) There are already programs which misuse "termcap"; the games "rain" and "worms" are two offenders. (They send "termcap" strings to the terminal directly through "fputs" instead of through "tputs"; this means that on a VT100 you get "5"s all over the screen due to "fputs" trying to put the delay strings out as text.) As such, I assumed that the problem was with "vi", not with "termcap", and that the change to "termcap" had been made but nobody got around to updating "vi" or the documentation. (Out-of-date documentation is, unfortunately, still a way of life in the UNIX community.) 2) The use of "al" and "dl" for the VT100 does make inserting multiple lines of text, and deleting lines, a bit nicer. 3) Given the number of different ways that terminals handle settable scrolling regions, can "termcap" and "vi" handle them all? (At our site, we have a terminal (Zentec 8001 with custom firmware) where a scrolling region has no effect on cursor positioning, a terminal (Concept 108) where cursor positioning is ALWAYS relative to the scrolling region, and a terminal (VT100) where it can work BOTH ways depending on whether the terminal is in "absolute" or "relative" cursor positioning mode.) Furthermore, does "termcap" properly handle terminals which do NOT have the save/restore cursor capabilities? 4) Given 2), it might be nice to submit the appropriate changes to "termcap" and "vi" over the network. Guy Harris RLG Corporation (decvax!duke!mcnc!rlgvax!guy)