[309] in Zephyr_Comments
Re: Multiple windows per message?
eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Fri Jun 9 20:03:17 1989
Doing real "formatting" (such as termcap stuff) on tty output is really
marginal... To do it "right", you'd have to come up with some sort
of window protocol (ref. VT300's) so that "special" output, such
as that from zwgc, could be displayed seperately from "normal" output...
This could be implemented with some sort of "stream" driver, but bsd
doesn't have streams. It's actually more on the order of something like the
Multics window_system...
So rather than do funky stuff to a tty (which, face it, is the wrong
thing most of the time... I personally use a dialup all of the time, over
a slow network, and I DON'T use zwgc. I zwrite to people, they talk
back at me, or write back at me... and I don't do much of that either.
Zephyr Funky Grams would be the *worst* thing to do... and with line noise, the
probably would be even worse. *maybe* something that saved the messages, and
"beeped" or something so that I could query for them would be reasonable. But
any solution has to take into account (1) multiple conversations (2) an emacs
that I may or may not be running (3) a discuss pager that can't scroll back wards...
) the tty output should be simple for those hwho need it as a fallback.
If anything, a feature to add would be some way of doing substrings, so that
you can put out very abbreviated messages that don't erase everything on your
screeen. It is hard, and it has enver really been done right... there
was a "ttyd" project in an old Usenix paper that had some of it done fairly
well, though.
