You've all seen the "terminal-aware sam" on the website: > It has been suggested that “…a curses interface for the > sam protocol would be interesting and perhaps even useful…”
I have a different suggestion, arguably better because it works as a frontend to ANY stdin/stdout program. You know the way when a terminal is in line mode, read calls don't receive anything until you hit enter? It's nice. And you know the way there's stuff (rlwrap) that simulates line mode by itself by setting the REAL tty to raw mode, but then intermediating reads between the tty your program, cooking the input while it does? My idea is to have something like rlwrap, but which runs full-screen, like vi, cursor addressing and whatnot, which can provide hold mode in addition to line mode. You run ed or sam -d in it, and you've basically got the nice- ness of those editors, which also having something similar to a screen editor on the terminal. It *should* work - I remind you at this point that hold mode is what made edmail usable back before acme mail (or help mail) was invented. I think you can guess by the name what kind of interface "edmail" has if you've never heard of edmail... At the risk of embiggening this email, I will inline an explanation of "hold mode": In line mode, your program doesn't know what you've typed until you've hit enter. In hold mode, your program doesn't know what you've typed until you've left hold mode. You can type multiple lines in hold mode, and if needed you can go back multiple lines and edit them before allowing ed/sam -d to read what you typed. And it's just a wrapper so it just works with any program. It's not the sort of thing you'd use if you had graphics available and access to an editor with the mouse, but it basically handles the same situation as what the original suggestion was...with the advantage of not being tied into sam and only sam. I will NOT write this, because I'm not some grey-on-black fixed-width terminal weenie that thinks their hand will fall off if they touch the mouse (as all of you still seem to be), and also because: From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@qua...> > if you build something you need, then at least one person > will use it. if you build something you think people need, > there's no such guarentee. but I AM throwing the idea out there because I think it's a better one than what's on the website. Stuart
