9 Mar
2006
9 Mar
'06
12:01 a.m.
I was not expecting termcap or curses; I was.. *hoping* (still not expecting)
that perhaps v7 was new enough that the 'simple' type of CRT terminals, the
ones that were basically just glass TTYs, were in common use. That it would
be possible to use stty to set the number of rows to n, and that just maybe
there would be a 'more' command that would only printout the next n lines.
You know, simple stuff. Nothing about cursor addressable displays, no special
codes for clearing the screen, or text attributes, just screen paging. At any
rate, I may sit down at some point and write a 'more' utility of my own. Not
that I need it for man pages now that I have the offline version of the
manual, but there are still things like long directory listings that it would
be useful for.
Actually, termcap and vi was ported back to V7 very early in the piece,
though you needed an ID space processor (aka PDP11/45/50/55/70) to run vi.
There were several paging programs about, some using termcap. From memory
there was dis, pg and more. The man command didn't do any pagination
Cheers
John