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From: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: when using termcap, get it right!
Message-ID: <1213@spice.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 16-Jun-87 00:20:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: spice.1213
Posted: Tue Jun 16 00:20:28 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jun-87 05:19:13 EDT
Reply-To: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 45

Keywords:


jdia@osiris.UUCP (Josh Diamond) writes

> I start up emacs, and discover that every time the screen is
> rewritten, emacs decides it wants to search! Why? because the GiGi's are
> so inept that they can't really hand 9600 baud (after all, their
> terminal logic is written in inerpretive basic!!).  So, they tell unix
> to stop sending data so they can catch up, using ^S/^Q.  But emacs
> interprets this as a search. &%$%*^$*&)^^%&-up eh?

A genuine DEC VT-100 can't deal with 9600 baud throughput either, and
does the exact same thing.  Whoever decided that a flow control
mechanism should use two characters out of the ASCII set should be
shot.

>     The "IDEAL" solution to this problem would be to make emacs
> understand pf-keys better.  Microemacs is easily kludged to do this.
> Isn't it about time this happened?
> 
>     I won't even mention that most emacs'es don't understand the cursor
> keys which exist on all but the most archaic terminals (and
> Macintoshes). :-)

But Emacs is supposed to be portable, not only across machine
architectures and operating systems but across input devices as well.
I use up to four different keyboards a day, with varying layouts and
differing function keys.  I also use four or more different flavors of
Emacs (GNU, MicroGNU, Epsilon, Hemlock (an Emacs written in Common
Lisp here at CMU) and (ugh) Gosling).  I for one am glad there is some
common denominator between all these editors, because my brain can't
handle that many context shifts.  As a result, I wind up using few
special features of these editors since I can't get used to using a
feature that's not present anywhere else.

GNU Emacs can be customized to recognize special keys on your
terminal, so you can bind functions to them.  At least it recognizes
the cursor and function keys on my Amiga emulating a VT-100.  I would
be surprised if the other variants of Emacs wouldn't let you do the
same.

				--M
-- 

Mike Portuesi / Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Department
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