Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 19 Nov 1999 09:48:44 -0800
From:      "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com>
To:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: misc/14959: incomplete xterm termcap entry (see also bug gnu/5039) 
Message-ID:  <95694.943033724@monkeys.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 19 Nov 1999 08:20:25 -0500. <19991119082025.A12676@mad> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

In message <19991119082025.A12676@mad>, 
Tim Vanderhoek <vanderh@ecf.utoronto.ca> wrote:

>On Thu, Nov 18, 1999 at 08:44:36PM +0200, Sheldon Hearn wrote:
>> 
>> > One of them is `more'.
>...
>A couple notes:
>
>1) The -e option is destined to become sub-useful (though perhaps not
>   to die...).  The -e will turn on by default when one of tags,
>   bookmarks, multiple files, or files with #lines > screen_length
>   is true.  See Joerg's comment, circa the middle ages, in the cvs
>   history.
>
>2) It's not clear from the conclusion of this thread (was there a
>   conclusion?) that hacking individual programs is the best thing to
>   do.  It seems to me that it may, however, be the best thing to
>   do...

My own personal ``final conclusion'' is that I should probably just do
what someone (I forget who) early on in this thread kinda hinted that
I should do...  i.e. just go away.

I think that the post by Gregory Bond <gnb@itga.com.au> made it clear
that regardless of my personal beliefs about how this should all be
done ``right'', I'm swimming against the tide of history with regard
to _both_ the notion of adding options to various programs to allow
their users to disable screen save/restore selectively _and_ also
withj regards to the notion of maybe enhancing termcap so that it
would have separate and distinct codes for the terminal save & restore
operations.

Gregory Bond's point that termcap/terminfo is _all_ just one big mechanism
for dealing with thing (i.e. ``terminals'' of more or less ``intelligence'')
that are now basically an obsolete technology is well taken.  I have to
admit that there really are only three types of ``terminals'' that I have
had any reason to care about with at least the past 5 years, i.e. xterm,
an x86 console, and a Sparc console.

So yet, given the hassle factor involved with getting _anything_ changed
with respect termcap/terminfo, and given that termcap/terminfo is largely
going the way of the dinosaur anyway, I for one am not inclined to worry
too much about this issue anymore _or_ to attempt to get the evident
problems with both termcap and the programs that use it ``fixed'' in a
proper way.  I have a hack/kludge/whatever that seems to work for me at
the moment, and guess I'll let it go at that.

(Obviously, somebody up there is trying to tell me that its past time for
me, as a person, to give up on my oldtime hacker command line orientation,
time for me to just join the point-and-drool crowd, and time for me to
just stop using xterm.  History has spoken, and now it is _me_ that's
rapidly becoming the dinosaur.  And no, I'm not kidding.  I'm just about
to switch from using MH to using Netscape Messenger for my mail reading &
writing anyway.  I have seen the future, and it is gooey... er... GUI.)

P.S.  I think that maybe I just now discerned yet another way to get the
general kind of behavior I want from vi anyway... I guess what I really
want is just a `xvi' command which, when invoked, will just pop up a
whole new/separate xterm window... leaving the current one unscathed...
and which will just run vi in that new xterm window.  Yea.  That would
work too, and I can brpbably just make that a C-shell alias.


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?95694.943033724>