Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: NeWS terminal emulators
Message-ID: <5022@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 2 Aug 88 02:42:33 GMT
References: <3411@phri.UUCP>
Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco
Lines: 37

Terminal emulators are one of NeWS's big holes now.  We at the Grasshopper
Group have been working on psterm, and it is now much better.  If you
were at Usenix, we demoed a mid-life version of it there.  It can be set
for any font, font size, # rows, or # columns.  It can either stretch the
font, or the #rows/cols, when you resize the window.  It has an optional
scroll bar.  It slices, it dices, it writes bad checks.

We also clarified the client source copyright with Sun so that we could
post it to the net.  We're interested in making NeWS more of a viable
window system -- nobody will buy our Mac A/UX version if NeWS loses in the
general market, after all.

The code is currently being tested and packaged up, and it will go into
the comp.sources.unix queue when it works and is easy to install.  We hope
that you won't be happy with that version, but will hack it and slash it
and send it back to us for an updated reposting; it's work in progress,
not an artistic jewel, and in particular the user interface needs work.

Eric Messick did the changes, with kibbutzing from me and Hugh Daniel.

There are some things that are hard to fix given psterm's structure.
Psterm is a "termcap interpreter" -- everything it knows about a
terminal comes from the terminal's termcap entry.  If your program
knows more about VT100's than what the termcap entry says, there will
be escape sequences that psterm cannot figure out.  If your terminfo
description is more complete than your termcap description, ditto.  Our
version of psterm defaults to emulating the "psterm" terminal, which
*no* programs know funny things about.  We provide termcap and terminfo
descriptions for the "psterm" terminal, which match exactly, and which are
optimized for use with psterm.

If you have made bugfixes to NeWS 1.1's psterm, please send them to me;
we will try to merge them into the comp.sources.unix posting, to make
everyone's life easier.
-- 
John Gilmore    {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu    gnu@toad.com
      "And if there's danger don't you try to overlook it,
       Because you knew the job was dangerous when you took it"