Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!tuna
From: tuna@athena.mit.edu (Kirk 'UhOh' Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: job control
Message-ID: <14987@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 10 Oct 89 04:47:30 GMT
References: <3492@ast.cs.vu.nl> <3498@solo10.cs.vu.nl> <3539@ast.cs.vu.nl> <3554@solo2.cs.vu.nl> <3592@ast.cs.vu.nl> <3630@solo5.cs.vu.nl> <3631@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Sender: news@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: tuna@athena.mit.edu (Kirk 'UhOh' Johnson)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 42

(humor: the old subject of this thread was "Re: Important new program:
cleanit.c". guess people don't look at their Subject line much ...)

In article <3631@ast.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
% Personally, I think a far better and more elgant solution would be
% virtual screens. You simulate N terminals on one. When you hit
% ALT-n, the contents of the screen and replaced by that of terminal ,
% and the keyboard is attached to terminal n. In effect, you are
% timesharing the one screen into n windows. Again, the trick is
% localize everything so that there are no tentacles all over the
% place. It won't be easy. 

this is the solution used in the version (2.1) of IBM's AIX i worked
with (on a PC/RT model 125). the thing i didn't like about their
implementation was that there was no easy way to tell how many of
these "virtual terminals" one had running, nor what they were actually
running.

with job control, i can say "jobs" and find out how many stopped jobs
i have and find out what they are doing. further, i can start up any
one of them i want with one simple command. in the AIX version of your
proposed solution, i could do neither. i could only cycle through my
entire set of active terminals, one at a time; this definitely had a
negative impact on the "usability" of the multiple virtual terminals
concept. BSD-like job control, in my eyes, is much nicer to use.

i think a reasonable interface must allow the user to 

    (1) find out how many virtual terminals are "active" (and also
    find out what each of those terminals is running)

    (2) switch to an arbitrary one of those virtual terminals with one
    simple command/keystroke

can such an interface be added on top of the multiple virtual
terminals idea with out introducing the same kind of complexity
introduced by job control?

is anybody out there actively working on this issue? or is it
primarily an idea that is just being thrown around?

kirk