SIDEKICK on Unix - saving the screen

[Al Schwartz]

In article <255 at 3comvax.UUCP> mikes at 3comvax.UUCP (Mike Shannon) writes:
>Try 'tee', the standard unix program to save screen contents to a file.
>-- 
>			Michael Shannon {ihnp4,hplabs}!oliveb!3comvax!mikes

After reading several of the responses to the original question posted, and
seen that they have misunderstood how Sidekick works, I have decided to clear
this up.  When you go to the 'capture' option in Sidekick, the following are
possible:

- The screen can be captured long after the program that put up the display
was run.
- The screen can be captured in printable ASCII characters only, even though
the program that put the characters there did it using random cursor
positioning (i.e. included sending escape sequences to the screen/terminal).
- Sidekick allows you to 'edit' which part of the screen to capture by moving
cursors which define the corners of the rectangle to be captured.

The above features of Sidekick should demonstrate that using 'tee' or 'script'
to capture the output of a running program is NOT the same as saving the
final screen.  If you don't think so then try running 'rogue' through 'tee'
and see what you get.

I do think that saving the screen can be accomplished if your terminal has
the ability to read the character under the cursor when given an escape
sequence to do so.  A program could be written to first position the cursor
at each character location that you wish to capture and then send the escape
sequence to read the character at that location and send it to the host
computer.  This is a program that would function like the Sidekick 'capture'.
My guess is that a lot of terminals DO NOT have the 'character read' feature
and this is the reason that there is no general UNIX program for it.
-- 
                  Al Schwartz
                  Pacesetter Systems, Inc.,  Sylmar, CA
UUCP: {ttidca|ihnp4|sdcrdcf|quad1|nrcvax|bellcore|logico}!psivax!al
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