Strangeness in shell

[Richard Tobin]

]-] Some of us think the right place is in the terminal!

]-The one problem with this approach is that you really should only maintain
]-a command line history when you're in canonical mode (ICANON, or COOKED).

]The terminal shouldn't know what a "command line" is.  Therefore it
]shouldn't be making this distinction.  I snarf&barf text freely between
]editor displays, command lines, and other text sources/sinks all the time.

Sure, but there's more to command-line editing than "snarf&barf".  If
you want to always be able to get your previous shell command by
typing control-P, and would like that to work in Lisp and /bin/cat as
well, but you also want control-P to be passed direct to emacs, then
it's fairly difficult for a terminal on a serial line to keep track.

It should be possible (if you have ptys) to write a program that
provides you with line-based command editing only when the terminal is
in cooked mode.  (It would be rather like "script".)  At present that
requires checking the terminal mode for each character typed - it
would be nice if there were a pty mode that told you when ioctls are
done on the slave side.

-- Richard
-- 
Richard Tobin,                       JANET: R.Tobin at uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,           ARPA:  R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.                UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin