Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 04:56:14 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jkh@winston.osd.bsdi.com (Jordan Hubbard) Cc: mckusick@mckusick.com (Kirk McKusick), arch@FreeBSD.ORG, rps@merlin.mat.uc.pt Subject: Re: Rui Pedro Mendes Salgueiro: erase2 patch (was: 4.2-RELEASE ISO image for x86 updated.) Message-ID: <200011280456.VAA25380@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <53352.975375693@winston.osd.bsdi.com> from "Jordan Hubbard" at Nov 27, 2000 05:41:33 PM
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> That said, I'm still not fully convinced that termios was implemented > in a fully sane fashion to begin with. If one uses a fairly competent > shell like bash, for example, you have a "bind" command which allows > you to map any key to any function and I've used that feature to good > effect in my .bashrc so I'd have a hard time with any argument that > fully bindable keys is an over-engineered solution. The major > drawback, of course, is that these editing characters are only useful > at the shell prompt and not with other programs which take input, > which is why readline(3) type functionality would really not be such a > horrible thing to see in termios(4). Shades of VMS' CTERM protocol... One nice thing that VMS did was to implement a state machine in their tty driver; this let them do nice things, like session switching on VT3xx terminals. It also let you know when the terminal was in the base state, as opposed to being in the middle of processing an escape sequence, so you could do things like modify the contents of a status line, or turn transparent printing on, send some data, and turn it back off, all without worring about managing multiplexing yourself. Computone and Intelliport did this is in a general way for more than just ANSI terminals (the only thing VMS worked with) with their Xenix and UNIX drivers by downloading the state tree down to the driver when the terminal type was set. They didn't support session switching, but they did support a tty and printer device, muxed in the kernel, to let them support a printer off the back of a terminal. I'm actually aware of a video rental chain that used these cards with the mux drivers and Wyse terminals to support receipt printing, and most of the systems are still in use today. All that said, I think that terminals are probably only going to become less and less common, as time goes on, and that it would be a lot of effortspent for naught to get readline or similar functionality into FreeBSD's drivers. Actually, this would probably be a perfect application for a Streams module... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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