gt0178a@prism.gatech.EDU (Jim Burns) (10/12/90)
in article <1990Oct11.085212@Unify.com>, grp@Unify.com (Greg Pasquariello) says: > A windowing environment has nothing to do with it. Like the man said, > see "job control", which allows me to put applications in the the > background, > or suspend them, until I am ready to use them again. At which point I > can invoke them very quickly and easily. It has everything to do with it. The pop-up windows type of TSR saves and restores context. Only a windowing environment, or screen repaint instructions build into your program, can do that. I'm sorry, but ^Z, then fg, then (if supported) the screen repaint instructions don't make it. The keystroke interpreter macro type of TSR is another example that's hard to support w/o something like 'pty'. (When I say windowing package, I mean something simple like 'screen' or 'pty'. See below.) And before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is not a DOS vs. unix issue - it's a user interface issue. Let's face it, curses is brain-damaged (we use JYACC's Jam at work). And X/11, Pres. Manager, News, whatever is not the answer either. Putting a dumb program in a windowing package doesn't make it smarter - it only makes the programmer's job harder than a user interface package would. (Any grumblings from PM or X programmers?) All I'm saying is that I'd like to see more of these packages in unix. -- BURNS,JIM Georgia Institute of Technology, Box 30178, Atlanta Georgia, 30332 uucp: ...!{decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!gt0178a Internet: gt0178a@prism.gatech.edu