Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!udel!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) Newsgroups: comp.terminals Subject: Re: WY-185 Message-ID: <13984@smoke.BRL.MIL> Date: 1 Oct 90 03:06:12 GMT References: Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD. Lines: 25 In article gr1c+@andrew.cmu.edu (Greg Howard Rhodes) writes: >The first of which is that the primary gnu-emacs command for doing a search >is control-S. Unfortunately, pressing control-s makes the terminal go into >"hold" mode...is there a way to disable this? This is a standard problem, due entirely to a conflict between the idea that Stallman has about what terminals "should" do versus what many terminals ACTUALLY are like. A large number of terminals require that DC3/DC1 (XOFF/XON, ^S/^Q) flow control be supported by the host in order that they not lose incoming information due to getting behind the rate of flow of data while performing lengthy operations such as scrolling. DEC's VT100 is perhaps the classical example of this. Thus, it would be folly to assume that these in-band flow control characters are available for other purposes, such as "search-forward" commands. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Stallman assumed and thus the default bindings for GNU EMACS assign ^S (DC3) as a user-typed "search-forward" command. The best resolution is to rebind the search command to something else (I use ^\ (FS)), and similarly for ^Q. Further, you have to persuade the text editor to allow DC3/DC1 to be used for control-flow purposes. If the editor is properly designed, it will honor any control-flow characters that you had established in the UNIX terminal handler before invoking the editor. Normally, one sets these "stty" parameters to DC3/DC1 in his .profile. You can do that for all terminal types, which is better than having to retrain your fingers as you move among different types of terminal.