From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 07:24:26 -0400
From: Vadim Antonov avg@postman.ncube.com
Subject: Set User (aka su)
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1a61a00e-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19950821112426.BavVCZ63ps2xyV3R-jqNiauM-pegmJjt5IelptlHc3o@z>

From: forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk

>the thing that many people want from hp -- support for the
>ESC-based cursor addressing schemes -- is the bulk of hp's source code.

HP is an extremely poor choice of terminal to emulate, as it
is overly complicated and full of margianlly useful features.
I counted lines, BTW, and >90% of the code is spent on doing
menus, yet another line discipline, emulating "cons" and "consctl",
etc etc. Only about 100 lines are devoted to parsing command
sequences (and most of them are unnecessary).

I would prefer arguing not about beliefs but about facts, ok?

>furthermore, the people who want that here are rarely satisfied
>by hp -- they wt more more more cursor addressing codes --
>specifically support for either VT320 or PC `ANSI' escape sequences.

It definitely makes sense to do something standard if the
standard exists.  You may argue till the hell freezes that
the electric plugs are of the wrong shape, but try to manufacture
"improved" ones which won't plug into old sockets.

>i've been looking at this recently, so i've had to read lots of vt220 emulators,
>the vt/pc emulator in the linux kernel, etc.  i don't accept this statement
>at all.

You don't need to emulate anything fancy, just a minimal device
which can be used as a display.

>also, the scrolling in hp is slow because it makes no attempt to be fast.

And doing it fast would bloat the code even more.

>>made user interface incoherent (can't call sam in the same
>>window as telnet!)

>i do not understand how support for cursor addressing makes the user interface
>`coherent' on any of the systems that support this archaic crud.

Sorry, emulation of a teletype is even more "archaic" than of
a display.  Bzzt.

>sam is usable in an X11 xterm only because it makes a separate call back to the terminal to produce something that isn't an xterm.

You didn't understand what i said.  Try to do:

hp
sam somefile

(telnet and cu are barely useful without hp).

--vadim