31 Dec
2014
31 Dec
'14
11:52 p.m.
On 2014-12-31 21:14, Clem Cole<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Jake - you have lots of help from others and using curses(3) is definitely
the right way to program.
But to answer your specific question about printf(string), according to
Chapter 3 (Programmer's Info) of my old VT-100 user's guide, I think what
is you are doing wrong is that "\033c" is not the ANSI clear to end of
screen command.
Right...
When I saw your message on my iPhone last night, the
cache said - wait that
can't be correct. But I could not remember why. So I had to wait until
I got back home today to look in my basement.
As I suspected, it's not an ANSI sequence. So are you running in VT-100
(ANSI) mode or VT52 mode? I ask because it is close to the VT52 cursor
right command which is actually: "\033C" but I do not remember is case
mattered.
Case do matter.
In VT52 mode you need to send the terminal:
"\033H\033J" to clear the
screen.
In ANSI mode, it becomes: "\033[1;1\033[0J"
Shorter form: "\033[H\033[J"
A few things to remember:
1.) Clear takes the current cursor position and clears from there to end of
X (where X depends on mode, and type of clear). So you need to move the
cursor to home position (aka 1,1).
Not really. It's way more advanced than that.
If we start with the generic clear screen, it is CSI Pn J
Where CSI can be expressed as ESC [ (or "\033[" in the same parlance as
above.)
Pn, then is an argument to the function, while J is the actual function
(clear screen in this case).
Now, Pn can cause many things:
0 Clear from cursor to end of screen
1 Clear from cursor to end of screen
2 Clear from beginning of screen to cursor
3 Clear whole screen
If no argument is given, the default is 0.
2.) VT-100's did not implement the full ANSI spec
like Ann Arbor, Heathkit,
Wyse etc. So there are a number of things that those terminals did
better. A really good reason to you curses(3) because all the knowledge is
keep in the termcap and as a programmer you don't need to worry about it.
Probably true. However, I'm not sure Ann Arbor or Heathkit did much
better. As far as I can remember, they were always more "weird", but I
might just be confused. However, curses(3) is definitely a good way of
not having to care about different terminal oddities.
3.) I saw sites were VT52 mode was sometimes preferred
because it was good
enough for most editing, and needed fewer chars to do manipulation. On
slow serial lines, this sometimes was helpful. That said, give me an AAA
any day. Like others, I still miss that terminal.:-)
Yeah, the VT52 was simpler, and had shorter control strings. But of
course, with the additional limitations that came with that.
Personally, I'd give an AAA or a Heathkit away if one was dropped on me.
A VT100 I would keep. :-)
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
1 Jan
1 Jan
1:29 a.m.
New subject: I swear! I rtfm'ed
All those terminal quirks made writing termcap entries challenging
(I wrote a few), and made the comments in the termcap file interesting
reading for the frustration and cursing of terminal firmware authors.
All kinds of history of the evolution of terminals is captured therein.
The removal of the ability to read the source is - IMHO - what
greatly impeded adoption of the AT&T "termlib" replacement for
termcap: they stopped distributing the terminal database source
(they distributed just the binary "compiled" versions), and made it
harder to write new entries.
Erik <fair(a)netbsd.org>
3:03 p.m.
New subject: I swear! I rtfm'ed
On 2015-01-01 02:29, Erik E. Fair wrote:
All those terminal quirks made writing termcap entries
challenging
(I wrote a few), and made the comments in the termcap file interesting
reading for the frustration and cursing of terminal firmware authors.
All kinds of history of the evolution of terminals is captured therein.
The removal of the ability to read the source is - IMHO - what
greatly impeded adoption of the AT&T "termlib" replacement for
termcap: they stopped distributing the terminal database source
(they distributed just the binary "compiled" versions), and made it
harder to write new entries.
I was way to removed from the action to know, but why did people slowly
move over to termlib? Was there really any advantages over termcap?
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
3:59 p.m.
New subject: I swear! I rtfm'ed
The move was from termcap to terminfo. Termlib was the library for termcap.
There were two problems with termcap. One was that the two-character
name space was running out of room, and the codes were becoming less and
less mnemonic.
But the big motivator was performance. Reading in a termcap entry from
/etc/termcap was terribly slow. First you had to scan all the way
through the (ever-growing) termcap file to find the correct entry. Once
you had it, every tgetstr (etc) had to scan from the beginning of the
entry, so starting up a program like vi involved quadratic performance
(time grew as the square of the length of the termcap entry.) The VAX
11/780 was a 1 MIPS processor (about the same as a 1 MHz Pentium) and
was shared among dozens of timesharing users, and some of the other
machines of the day (750 and 730 Vaxen, PDP-11, etc.) were even slower.
It took forever to start up vi or more or any of the termcap-based
programs people were using a lot.
I wrote a paper about it for Usenix in 1982, but it seems to be lost to
Google. Here is a nice write-up Pavel Curtis posted about it with more
detail about the motivation:
http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix-source-code/research/1982/0711.html
Mary Ann
On 01/01/2015 07:03 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2015-01-01 02:29, Erik E. Fair wrote:
All those terminal quirks made writing termcap
entries challenging
(I wrote a few), and made the comments in the termcap file interesting
reading for the frustration and cursing of terminal firmware authors.
All kinds of history of the evolution of terminals is captured therein.
The removal of the ability to read the source is - IMHO - what
greatly impeded adoption of the AT&T "termlib" replacement for
termcap: they stopped distributing the terminal database source
(they distributed just the binary "compiled" versions), and made it
harder to write new entries.
I was way to removed from the action to know, but why did people
slowly move over to termlib? Was there really any advantages over
termcap?
Johnny
4:01 p.m.
New subject: I swear! I rtfm'ed
below ..
On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt(a)update.uu.se> wrote:
Case do matter.
I thought so, but it's been years since I played with any of this.
Shorter form: "\033[H\033[J"
right - that looks much more what I remember.
2.) VT-100's did not implement the full ANSI spec like Ann Arbor,
They did - but they had the advantage of complete spec, which when then
VT-100 team did their thing, was working with a proposal.
Heathkit,
Wyse etc. So there are a number of things that those terminals did
better. A really good reason to you curses(3) because all the knowledge
is
keep in the termcap and as a programmer you don't need to worry about it.
Probably true. However, I'm not sure Ann Arbor or Heathkit did much better. As far as I can remember, they were always more
"weird"
I guess. Maybe the were not too go at running programs like EDT on VMS.
which used the DEC private sequences. As I recall you grew up on RSX and
VMS so would not have had the same affinity that we in the UNIX side did.
VMS folks tended to stay with something that looked a lot like VT-100,
whereas UNIX folks often chose more functionality in the terminal.
Personally, I'd give an AAA or a Heathkit away if one was dropped on me. A
VT100 I would keep. :-)
To each each his own. I still have an H19 and a Wyse-60. Would love to
find an old AAA, but I personally would not bother with any member of
VT-100 family since most SW emulators are "good enough" for my use when I
might want VT-100 specifics.
I heard that some folks in the VMS world gripe about the emulators not
being good enough, but my use has never been that much and certainly there
are lots of other issues with the newer VT-xxx's that drove me bonkers.
I've sometimes toyed with the thought of taking one of the Mac Terminal
emulators and hacking it in AAA features, but it's never been high on my
list. I have always had too many other worthy projects in front of it.
Truth is the programmable keyboard macros of the Tek 4025 and AAA are what
I miss in modern systems more than anything else.
Then again, if I had one, I'd probably hate the keyboard layout these days.
Once the ANSI/ECMA keyboard layout came out, I forced myself to key used to
it and actually now prefer it. But that took years to reprogram the ROMS
in my fingers. ;-)
Clem
4:11 p.m.
New subject: I swear! I rtfm'ed
On 2015-01-01 17:01, Clem Cole wrote:
below ..
On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt(a)update.uu.se
<mailto:bqt@update.uu.se>> wrote:
2.) VT-100's did not implement the full ANSI spec like Ann
Arbor, Heathkit,
Wyse etc. So there are a number of things that those terminals did
better. A really good reason to you curses(3) because all the
knowledge is
keep in the termcap and as a programmer you don't need to worry
about it.
Probably true. However, I'm not sure Ann Arbor or Heathkit did much
better.
They did - but they had the advantage of complete spec, which when then
VT-100 team did their thing, was working with a proposal.
True. Not sure how much changed though. Do you have any list of things
that differs, and things that AA or Heathkit did better?
As far as I can remember, they were always more
"weird"
I guess. Maybe the were not too go at running programs like EDT on
VMS. which used the DEC private sequences. As I recall you grew up on
RSX and VMS so would not have had the same affinity that we in the UNIX
side did.
True that I grew up on DEC OSes, but I never used EDT. Always Emacs.
(Proper Emacs, that is, not the GNU stuff... :-) )
VMS folks tended to stay with something that looked a
lot like VT-100,
whereas UNIX folks often chose more functionality in the terminal.
Possible. But people in general seems to have preferred the VT100 to
most other stuff on Unix as well, judging by history.
Personally, I'd give an AAA or a Heathkit
away if one was dropped on
me. A VT100 I would keep. :-)
To each each his own. I still have an H19 and a Wyse-60. Would love
to find an old AAA, but I personally would not bother with any member of
VT-100 family since most SW emulators are "good enough" for my use when
I might want VT-100 specifics.
Indeed. To each his own. No problem with that.
And yes, most VT-100 emulators suck seriously. I usually identifies the
first problem within 10 seconds, and almost all emulators do some of the
common simple stuff wrong.
xterm is my savior. It actually do things pretty might right all the time.
I heard that some folks in the VMS world gripe
about the emulators
not being good enough, but my use has never been that much and certainly
there are lots of other issues with the newer VT-xxx's that drove me
bonkers.
Let me guess - the missing escape key? :-)
(That one drove almost everyone bonkers...)
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
4:59 p.m.
New subject: I swear! I rtfm'ed
below...
On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 11:11 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt(a)update.uu.se> wrote:
True. Not sure how much changed though. Do you have any list of things
that differs, and things that AA or Heathkit did better?
I've forgotten the specifics. MaryAnn may remember - having lived much of
the brain-damage with so many manufactures. IIRC: Erase and line
operations was one of them. Tom implemented the regions stuff which again,
if I remember could be dorked into doing some of the stuff that was
missing/different. Unfortunately, they deviated it as hard to come back
to what the rest of the world did. Plus Tom left DEC for Masscomp around
the time of 102 FW and I suspect that sort of sealed it a little.
I've lost track of him, but I heard at a party a week before Christmas that
he is still knocking around the area, so if I can dig him up, I'll try to
remember to ask him.
Always Emacs. (Proper Emacs, that is, not the GNU stuff... :-) )
Fair enough. FYI: I learned Emacs on the 10s before I ever saw UNIX.
Gosling would not come to CMU for another couple of years, so we used ed
and later "Fred" which was the first screen editor for UNIX I saw. By the
time CMU and MIT Emacs made it to UNIX I was at Berkeley and vi was burned
into the roms.
Possible. But people in general seems to have
preferred the VT100 to most
other stuff on Unix as well, judging by history.
I'm not so sure. My experience is otherwise. There were two vectors at
the time - cheap/simple (think ADM3A and later Wyse) and smart/expensive
(think HP & Tek and later AA). The VT-100 family fell in-between. You
are right, it was incredibly successful and the fact is there were lots of
clones of the VT-100 - so you did see them on UNIX boxes sometimes.
But as Horton mentioned on the termcap/terminfo thread - there were a ton
of players in the cheap/simple side. I think more UNIX sites tended to
play out the cheap and simple over anything else, so most sites would get a
deal on a one or another. CMU went with PK's Fox with smattering of ADMs.
UCB was ADMs or something very high end. I saw most of the smart HP &
Tek terminals at the BTL sites.
My experience was that VMS/RSX, and to some extent, Twinex, shops tended to
migrate to the VT-100s or clones - probably because the native DEC SW were
well intregrated, but Unix folks either wanted cheap or as much
functionality as possible. Curses(3) really allowed that occur. I think
"cheap and simple" came first, but once termcap existed, it really allowed
the UNIX folks to use what ever they wanted. But as Erik mentioned, we
all had to hack termcap entries (usually by hacking on an existing one).
xterm is my savior. It actually do things pretty might
right all the time.
Twas for me too for a long time. iterm2 on the Mac is that pretty much
my standard these days.
Let me guess - the missing escape key? :-)
(That one drove almost everyone bonkers...)
Just one of many :-) Control and Caps were in wrong place.
BTW: Tek had a layout was worse - it had the 0 next to 1 which caused me to
make a painful screw up. I've forgotten which terminal it was, but we had
one of them as console on the Teklab 11/60 and I typo-ed and wiped out a
bunch of Fred Park's life work.
Thus creating the infamous "guts in the bucket/ball on a platter"
comment in the bugs section of the RT-PIP man page that got me in trouble a
few years later.
8:11 p.m.
New subject: I swear! I rtfm'ed
On Thu, 1 Jan 2015, Johnny Billquist wrote:
I was way to removed from the action to know, but why
did people slowly
move over to termlib? Was there really any advantages over termcap?
It was a lot more flexible; attribute names could be of arbitrary length,
whereas Termcap confined you to two characters IIRC. You had to get a bit
imaginative in the naming of new attributes...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server."
http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there)
8:18 p.m.
New subject: I swear! I rtfm'ed
On Thu, 1 Jan 2015, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
The move was from termcap to terminfo. Termlib was
the library for
termcap.
Oops - ignore my subsequent contribution (it *was* some years ago...).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server."
http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there)
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participants (5)
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Clem Cole -
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Erik E. Fair -
Johnny Billquist -
Mary Ann Horton