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000302_news@watsun.cc.columbia.edu _Sun Feb 28 12:01:35 1999.msg
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From: jrd@cc.usu.edu (Joe Doupnik)
Subject: Re: MS-Kermit /C-Kermit screen appearance
Message-ID: <7ET5CdY3ddfZ@cc.usu.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 99 09:27:29 MDT
Organization: Utah State University
To: kermit.misc@mailrelay2.cc.columbia.edu
In article <F7vBqJ.A39@cix.compulink.co.uk>, lsystemsd@cix.compulink.co.uk ("Lygo Systems") writes:
> I'm using MS-Kermit as a terminal emulator and it works just fine for the
> price. But I am now hoping to improve the look and feel and feel of the
> applications that I am writing.
>
> Question 1.
> Does anyone know of a way to save the current screen, go off and paint
> another screen and then be able to instantly refresh the first screen?
> Better still, is there a way to save several screens? More expensive
> emulators and many dumb terminals have this capability. I can't see any
> escape sequences in the manual, although there is manual back-paging. Are
> there any DOS or Linux utilities that can be called as a macro from Kermit
> without Kermit disrupting the function?
This begs the question of locus of control. When you are running
MSK it seems to be in terminal emulation mode (CONNECT), and that does
mean actions come from two sources: the user's keyboard (most info goes
out the wire) and the remote host (which thinks this end is a VT320
terminal or similar).
From your description you seem to be wanting a Point of Sale
screen painting system with comms. That can be done, but the remote
host would be responsible for triggering actions and painting screens.
> Question 2.
> On a similar theme, is there a way to load onto the screen a screen "form"
> held on the local system? Although we are using TCP/IP, being able to
> retrieve the new screen from a local ramdisk via an escape sequence or
> macro would, I have thought, been faster.
>
A full text screen takes 4KB to represent, lots less if only
some characters are written to a uniform background. That takes about
four Ethernet packets, as fast as anything to the human eye.
There is no user-designed screen save/fetch facility in MSK
at this time. Such things are not part of terminal emulation.
> Question 3.
> Is there a way, using MS-Kermit or C-Kermit on Linux, to improve the
> "green screen" appearance? What I'm hoping for is something that
> cosmetically looks more like a GUI (sculpted boxes, different fonts,
> graphic images, backgrounds, etc), all by the use of escape sequences
> and/or macros. But I don't want to use a pointing device - this is for
> use in a retail environment. Obviously there is nothing in Kermit itself,
> but can it be "wrapped" in some cosmetic front end that can be controlled
> easily by the application?
Text mode uses the system video Bios for fonts and so on. To create
special effects such as you describe requires full graphics mode with all
the bulk that goes with it. MSK has a lot of graphics mode support for
Tektronix and Data General terminal kinds, and one can write to those specs
to create cosmetically advanced "text" screens. But the results won't be
VT320 emulation and the host would have to send the drawing commands. The
end result is screen updates are slower than text mode, but basically ok on
today's equipment.
Please keep in mind that retaining fonts and so on locally runs into
severe memory constraint problems, there being only about 600KB to play with
in real mode before MSK loads (which takes 300KB).
> Question 4.
> Is it bad netiquette to ask so many questions in one message? If so, I
> apologise most profusely.
No need; it is a good idea to get everything laid out at once.
Joe D.
> Thanks in anticipation.
> Bill.