Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ginosko!shadooby!mailrus!purdue!haven!uvaarpa!hudson!astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU!gl8f
From: gl8f@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Heretical Suggestion: Windowing System
Message-ID: <2160@hudson.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: 23 Oct 89 05:26:30 GMT
Sender: news@hudson.acc.virginia.edu
Reply-To: gl8f@astsun.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
Lines: 28

No doubt Andy will never speak to me again, but...

I'm not a Minix user yet, but I plan on it, and I'd like to have a
evil windowing system to go with it. Certainly the 386 and 68000 minix
versions could support a small, efficient one. Not X Windows.

Has anyone considered mgr? It's small and fast. On my 4 meg 3/60, it
leaves 2 megs free when I'm at the desktop. The sun3 executable is around
163k. It requires pty's and a bitmapped display to work.

It has nice features, other than the speed. You talk to windows
through an ordinary stream of text, so you can easily put a client on
the other end of your telnet connection or whatever by just including
a .h file. Try that with X ;-) The graphics commands are merely
vt100-style escape sequences stuck in the text. Termap is supported in
windows. And, for ST people, it doesn't do any processing in the child
side of forks.

I don't know if it would be easy to port to Minix. I don't know enough
about Minix. But if you're looking for a project...

You can ftp the current version from bellcore.com, or a slightly
earlier version is in the comp.sources.unix archive.


------
Greg Lindahl
gl8f@virginia.edu                                             I'm not the NRA.