Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!ptsfa!ames!husc6!linus!philabs!lamont!rbd
From: rbd@lamont.Columbia.edu (roger davis)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: xterm/uwm/toolkit questions
Message-ID: <305@fats.lamont.Columbia.edu>
Date: 22 Jan 88 20:30:55 GMT
Organization: Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory N.Y.
Lines: 30

I am a newcomer to X, having just recently installed X11 on a network
consisting mainly of Suns running SunOS 3.4, and would greatly appreciate
any information which any one could provide on the following three
(unrelated) questions.

(1) Vi seems to have trouble in xterm with lines which are longer than
the window width. It wraps them around but inserts a blank line in the
middle, causing the contents of the remainder of the window to be
inaccurate. I've installed the termcap entry which was provided on the
release tape.

(2) I like the functionality and flexibility of uwm, but as an
applications programmer am concerned with the possibility of users
causing events which a particular program may look for to be intercepted
by uwm and interpreted according to their .uwmrc file. It seems a great
pity to (a) waste the programmabilty of uwm by distributing a site-wide
.uwmrc file and forbidding all of our users to change it and (b) proscribe
the use of certain mouse/keyboard combinations by applications -- what I would
like to see is a uwm that only grabs events occurring within a namestripe
or border and leaves everything else alone. Is there a window manager similar
to uwm out there that does this now? Does anyone know if Sun is planning to
distribute such a product with their X release?

(3) There was some discussion at the recent X conference regarding the
portability of toolkits. My (very limited) understanding of toolkit
philosophy is that the toolkit is built directly on top of Xlib.
Aside from the usual C portability issues, if a particular box has a
properly implemented server and a working Xlib, why should there be
any problem? Am I just being incredibly naive about this? In particular,
why is the current Xtk broken on Suns -- or is it my server that's broken?