On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Jim Sibley wrote: > I find it amusing that the the Unix purists are defending a 1950's type > line editor (with input and command mod) designed for a teletype keyboard > and paper roll output then converted to the glass teletype equivalent. The > keyboards on teletypes were notoriously slow, heavy to the touch, and the > line speeds were so slow that they were desparate to find any method to > speed up the transmission (ctl/alt modifier keys), no matter how awkward!
command-mode has some other atvantages: command-history. vim (for example) uses this in a very useful manner. > > That this has been enshrined on Linux is certainly short sighted. The only > reason I use vi is that 1) it is much the same on each *NIX system, 2) and > it is reasonably compatible with the ex editor and sed for HMC and 3270 > terminals, so I don't have to relearn an editor everytime I change terminal > type. > > Its just as amusing that the 1970's technology of the 80 column card, > transfered on the 3270 glass tube was enshrined on MVS as ispf and VM as > xedit. Neither of them work very well for long, variable length "records" > such as a long /etc/parmfile line. And its beyond annoying when xedit > translates my parmfile to ALL UPPER CASE by default. The "case m i" command > is NOT intuitive. At least ispf prereads the data and sets the mode to > something reasonable, but then its pretty bad at dealing with something > past 80 bytes. Vi has sense enough to wrap the lines. > > What really is needed is a simple editor that is a more intuitive and > universal, rather than arguing whether the 3270 implementations are better > or worse than the teletype implementations. But there are plenty of those! (pico^H^H^H^Hnano and joe are nice two. relatively intuitive). But both will show garbage on a 3270 terminal... > > Maybe someone could come up with a simple Java editor that will work the > same on HMC, 3270, and teletype terminals! Its an editor guys - we > shouldn't have to read a 3 inch manual to make it work! No. most unix text editors use termcap/terminfo to get information about the capabilities of the terminal . Most of them use the library ncurses for terminal "graphics", some use slang. I saw that there is a terminfo entry of "ibm327x" . When I tried to use it pico (sorry, that is the only ncurses program I have at my disposal at tha machine) blantly refused: 'ibm327x': I need something more specific. I tried some other 'ibm*' entries, all of them were accepted, but I got all sorts of different garbages: the escape sequeces were clearly not interpreted by the terminal. Is there any way to get proper termcap/terminfo entries working? (e.g: avoid the need for "unalias ls"?) Or is any general solution in this path needs to be more radical (e.g: some specific support inside ncurses for 3270 terminals? I don't know terminal devices very well) -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
