Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!lilink!aladdin
From: aladdin@lilink.UUCP (Eugene Choi)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: VI for DOS
Keywords: dos,vi,clones,nansi
Message-ID: <829@lilink.UUCP>
Date: 31 Aug 89 07:05:27 GMT
References: <1079@neptune.AMD.COM>
Reply-To: aladdin@lilink.UUCP (Eugene Choi)
Distribution: na
Organization: LILINK Public Xenix, Long Island, New York
Lines: 19

In article <1079@neptune.AMD.COM> kevin@neptune.AMD.COM (Kevin Tomasek) writes:
>Also,  What is a nansi.sys
>	What is a TSR
>	What is a curses/pccurses/....
>
 1)	nansi.sys is a IBM PC(?) "device driver" ( fancy name for a program
that becomes part of MSDOS ) for screens.  What it does is take certain
character sequences ( determined by some ANSI committee ) and translates them
into screen operations like clearing the screen, or moving the cursor to
a particular location on the screen.  The benefit is that you can write
programs that can work the same way on different machines.

 2)     TSR is an acronym for Terminate-Stay-Resident.  It is an expression
for programs that "reside" in memory ( rather than the hard disk ).

 3)	curses is a wonderful package of screen manipulation routines
written in C.  It can be quite handy for writing programs that manipulate
the screen.  pccurses is a version of the curses package.  If you don't
program, you'll never have to worry about it...