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Date:      Mon, 14 Jul 2003 18:41:28 GMT
From:      abc@ai1.anchorage.mtaonline.net
To:        "freebsd-questions" <questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: vt/ansi codes
Message-ID:  <200307141841.h6EIfSrn027962@en26.ai1.anchorage.mtaonline.net>

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Re:Starting with Unix (Score:4, Insightful)
by spitzak (4019) on Sunday April 27, @01:18PM (#5819797)
(http://www.cinenet.net/~spitzak)

Terminal driver design is certainly a stupid part of Unix. Back when this was
written there certainly was a serious mess of terminals which would actually
fail non-gracefully on output designed for other terminals.

But this is not true today. Today EVERY SINGLE TERMINAL IN THE WORLD
understands ANSI escape sequences at full speed and will not choke (and will
likely display) on all ISO-8859-1 characters. It is time to scrap every single
option in the editing portion of the terminal driver. And start accepting
*both* ^H and ^? as backspace.

I would agree that in this area, morbid fear of being incompatable is
completely freezing development. Sometimes advancement is achieved by DELETING
code, not just by adding it.



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