Usenet 1994 January/usenetsourcesnewsgroupsinfomagicjanuary1994.iso/sources/std_unix/mod.std.unix.v7/text0057.txt

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From: [e-mail] (Larry Campbell)
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 86 11:43:38 EDT
Organization: The Boston Software Works, Inc.

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Guy Harris) writes:

>This sort of windowing mechanism doesn't even necessarily require a
>memory-mapped screen; it merely needs a way to redraw a window when it moves
>to the front.  Mark Horton's earlier message describes a window manager for
>dumb terminals; it even permits more than one window on the screen.

Of course, but I suspect that redrawing windows over a serial line
would be tedious -- unless the serial line were running at 56KB or better.

>As for the window size "ioctl", consider this: any program that thinks it's
>always dealing with a "perfectly ordinary 24x80 terminal" is going to be
>quite surprised when run on an Ann Arbor Ambassador with 60 lines.  Programs
>should not make assumptions like that.

That was an oversimplification on my part.  Of course programs should
(and most do) query termcap/terminfo.  However, they can safely assume
that the window size isn't going to change while they're running, and
this assumption reduces complexity.
--
Larry Campbell            MCI: LCAMPBELL   The Boston Software Works, Inc.
ARPA: [e-mail]   120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109
UUCP: {alliant,wjh12}!maynard!campbell     [phone]

Volume-Number: Volume 7, Number 58