User Interfaces ( was Re: RAM disk.)

[Jim Burns]

in article <1990Oct11.085212 at Unify.com>, grp at Unify.com (Greg Pasquariello) says:

> A windowing environment has nothing to do with it.  Like the man said,
> see "job control", which allows me to put applications in the the
> background,
> or suspend them, until I am ready to use them again.  At which point I
> can invoke them very quickly and easily.

It has everything to do with it. The pop-up windows type of TSR saves and
restores context. Only a windowing environment, or screen repaint
instructions build into your program, can do that. I'm sorry, but ^Z, then
fg, then (if supported) the screen repaint instructions don't make it. The
keystroke interpreter macro type of TSR is another example that's hard to
support w/o something like 'pty'. (When I say windowing package, I mean
something simple like 'screen' or 'pty'. See below.)

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, this is not a DOS vs. unix issue -
it's a user interface issue. Let's face it, curses is brain-damaged (we
use JYACC's Jam at work). And X/11, Pres. Manager, News, whatever is not
the answer either. Putting a dumb program in a windowing package doesn't
make it smarter - it only makes the programmer's job harder than a user
interface package would. (Any grumblings from PM or X programmers?) All
I'm saying is that I'd like to see more of these packages in unix.
-- 
BURNS,JIM
Georgia Institute of Technology, Box 30178, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
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