Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!purdue!mailrus!ames!pacbell!pbhyf!rob
From: rob@pbhyf.PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Pager limitations
Message-ID: <4035@pbhyf.PacBell.COM>
Date: 8 Oct 88 09:42:47 GMT
References: <958@raspail.UUCP>
Reply-To: rob@pbhyf.PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Lines: 40

In article <958@raspail.UUCP> steve@raspail.UUCP (Steve Schonberger) writes:
+One thing that bothers me about elm (I have 1.7, so this may have
+been changed in later versions) is that when you look at a long
+note, there is no way to go down a half screen, or go up at all.

I have proposed an enhancement to the elm 2.2 development team
for the builtin pager. I have proposed that the pager be capable of:

    moving forward or backward one screenful
    skipping forward or backward a specified number of screenfuls

    moving forward or backward one line
    skipping forward or backward a specified number of lines

    moving to a specific line number
    moving to a specific percentage of the way through the message
	(which includes returning to the beginning of the message
	and going to the end of the message) (cf. the pager "less")

    searching forward or backward for a pattern

Wrt to the last capability, regular expressions would be nice. Is
regex(3) and recmp(3) (part of libPW.a) found on most UNIX systems?
(If not, we'd have to come up with look-alikes to include this capability
uniformly. - >groan<)

+If that is in place in the later versions, wonderful -- I'll hassle
+some locals for a copy of it.  If not, it would be nice if someone
+could think about putting it in place.

I hope to have enhancement worked out and submitted for the official
release of elm 2.2. Maybe this is a good time to rewrite *all* the pager
stuff since, if you saw the other postings here about scrambled stdio
buffers, the interface to standalone pagers needs revamping as well.
Got my work cut out for me. :-(
-- 
Rob Bernardo, Pacific Bell UNIX/C Reusable Code Library
Email:     ...![backbone]!pacbell!rob   OR  rob@PacBell.COM
Office:    (415) 823-2417  Room 4E750A, San Ramon Valley Administrative Center
Residence: (415) 827-4301  R Bar JB, Concord, California