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From: karsten@tfl.dk
Newsgroups: comp.editors,comp.os.vms,vmsnet.misc
Subject: Re: SMG based editor on VAX/VMS
Message-ID: <33.26e53a2c@tfl.dk>
Date: 5 Sep 90 15:54:05 GMT
References: <JYM.90Aug30182054@remarque.berkeley.edu> <2487@naucse.cse.nau.edu>
Followup-To: comp.editors
Lines: 40

In article <2487@naucse.cse.nau.edu>, jdc@naucse.cse.nau.edu (John Campbell) writes:
> From article <JYM.90Aug30182054@remarque.berkeley.edu>, by jym@remarque.berkeley.edu (Jym Dyer):
>> .-.
>> |I|'ve seen an editor based on SMG.  It was blindingly slow,
>> `-' though some of this is due to its trying fancy things (like
>>     drawing ephemeral boxes over top of things).
>>     <_Jym_>
> 
> [...]
> 
> Anyway, we use NED (NAU Editor) here nearly as much as we use EVE.  NED
> is about 10-20% less efficient in CPU usage than EVE doing the same tasks.
> Moving off our VAX 11-730 and up to a VAX 6310, however, made the 10% or
> so penalty moot.  Last time I looked at full-blown emacs (back when it
> was first ready for VMS) it was much more than a 20% penalty over EDT.
> By the way, NED uses less memory to do the same tasks as EVE (and I wasn't
> being all that careful about memory when I designed it).  One could argue
> that TPU wasn't a good tool to write editors with either.

I think the discussion about whether or not TPU should use SMG is
based on a wrong assumption.  The assumption is that TPU should use
either SMG or some routines written for TPU for writing on terminals.
The screen management routines are not build into TPU.  They are
loaded by LIB$FIND_IMAGE_SYMBOL and are placed in
SYS$SHARE:TPU$CCTSHR.EXE and SYS$SHARE:TPU$DECWSHR.EXE which support
VT%%% terminals and DECwindows respectively.  You can specify any
image file, which define the right symbols as the value of the
EDIT/TPU/DISPLAY qualifier.  EDIT/TPU/DISPLAY=DECWINDOWS is a
shorthand for EDIT/TPU/DISPLAY=SYS$SHARE:TPU$DECWSHR.EXE.  DEC or
anybody with VAX/VMS micro fiches could write a shareable image which
does screen management for TPU and is based on SMG. Then the users
with Digital terminals could use TPU$CCTSHR, and all others could use
the SMG based version.

IMHO providing support for third party terminals without supporting at
least one editor on these terminals is of no value.

Karsten Nyblad
TFL, A Danish Telecommunication Research Laboratory
E-mail: karsten@tfl.dk