Xref: utzoo comp.sources.bugs:924 comp.unix.wizards:8088
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu!paul
From: paul@morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu (Paul Placeway)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: tset (BSD?)
Message-ID: <11797@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 27 Apr 88 18:53:24 GMT
References: <8776@sol.ARPA> <4493@hoptoad.uucp>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer and Information Science
Lines: 34

In article <4493@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
< Stanford actually implemented two erase characters in the Unix tty
< driver.  I think this is a great idea.  You can set it so that both BS
< and DEL will erase a character, in all programs, not just those that
< have been jiggered like Ken proposes for "tset".  For some reason,
< people at Berkeley and Sun did not like this change and it is still a
< local Stanford thing.

From the other things I have heard, this is typical Berkeley.  Another
example is the CMU detachable ptys (a _really_ good idea): basically a
given pty is not hard-associated with the _same_ tty, but can be
assigned to an arbitrary free one (or one you allready own).  This
allows the user to hang up one terminal, and go to another and continue
the login session.  Naturally, since it was not invented at Berkeley, it
didn't make it into the distributions.  *sigh*

For terminals, I think that all of the flavors of Unix have been going
about key function binding all wrong.  Unix should not bind keys to
functions, but rather functions to keys: have a per-character table, 
each entry of which tells the tty driver which function to run for that
key. (Sound like Emacs?)  Among other things this would be faster,
because the driver would not have to search through a list of 7-14 (or
so) functions for each key.

Now this would require more memory per tty (like 256 bytes), but then
again most Unixes are runing on machines that are somewhat bigger than
PDP-11s...

		-- Paul
-=-
Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.