Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!vsi1!wyse!mips!dce
From: dce@mips.COM (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: VT100 terminfo problem
Message-ID: <3340@dunkshot.mips.COM>
Date: 16 Sep 88 22:01:48 GMT
Reply-To: dce@mips.COM (David Elliott)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 25


We have found that running some DEC VT100 terminals on our systems (any
Mips system running the System V.3-based os) has problems in vi.

Specifically, we find that if we edit a large file and page through it
rapidly by holding down 'j' or the down arrow, the terminal starts
displaying parity errors at the beginnings of lines.  Similar things
happen when we page up using 'k' or the up arrow key.

I looked at the terminfo entry and the curses library source, and found
the following:

   The terminfo entry has xon, which tells curses not to do padding,
   since the terminal doesn't handle XON/XOFF very well.  When I
   removed xon, going up worked better because padding occurred.

   I went on to add padding (3 ms) to the cr string (setting it to
   cr=\r$<3>) and everything worked better.

My question is this:  Do some VT100s not do XON/XOFF handshaking
properly, or is it more likely that we aren't doing XON/XOFF
correctly?

-- 
David Elliott		dce@mips.com  or  {ames,prls,pyramid,decwrl}!mips!dce