Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: autowrap
Message-ID: <8439@smoke.ARPA>
Date: 6 Sep 88 03:34:05 GMT
References: <1988Sep2.224258.27960@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <1402@spp2.UUCP> <8437@smoke.ARPA> <3854@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 22

In article <3854@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>There is no need to backspace across screen lines, but when normally
>sending output to the terminal, autowrap emulation would be useful.

To the contrary, you can pipe your output through a "fold" filter,
but this discussion was about command-line editing, for which you
really need both capabilities whenever the command line gets long.

>4.3BSD keeps screen width information somewhere in its tty data
>structures.

Unfortunately they're only set while a window manager is in control.
The standard login sequence really ought to set up this data as well
as the TERM environment variable.  But then, it may not be wise to
make login depend on termcap either.

>... I hope 4.3BSD people
>will give us no-parity input/output too in the future.

You can already get that, with some difficulty.
Word is that future BSDs will support the IEEE 1003.1 terminal
interface, which should be good enough.