How does man know?

[Bruce Barnett]

In article <2281 at munnari.oz.au>, ok at cs (Richard O'Keefe) writes:

>> Richard O'Keefe mentions one (<2258 at munnari.oz.au>) that is
>> enabled by typing "stty rows 0".
>
>No, I mentioned on which was **DIS**abled by doing that.

Darn! Sorry for the typo.

>> Paging has nothing to do with the number of rows a terminal has.

>Yes it does.

Darn! Darn! I ment to say that you should be able to
change the state of the paging without changing the size of the window.
See below.

>The pager needs to know how many lines of text it can
>display before it is time to stop and wait for the user to say s/he
>is ready for the next screenful.  That number of lines is precisely
>the relevant number of "rows".

But how can I resize a window, changing the rows and columns,
but still retain the flag that I do or do not want paging?

The rows and columns information should not specify if paging should
or should not be done. Perhaps a 'stty page' is needed.
Or else rows should not be used to determine the current size of a window.
(It doesn't on Sun's. It merely reflects the current state.)

>What has STREAMS to say to anything?  In the V.3 system I used, terminals
>weren't STREAMS things anyway.  Paging in the terminal driver predates
>STREAMS by decades!  I used EUUG V7 on an old "Bantam" terminal, about
>as simple a 24-by-80 terminal as ever had cursor addressing.

Guilty of ignorance.

	Perhaps another solution in a future version of Unix is to
attach a process to your /dev/stdout and /dev/stdin. Something like a
pseudo TTY in that it appears to be the stdin and stdout to all
programs doing terminal I/O to the default device.

	This would allow a user to customize his/her handling of
the "default stdout" and do so in a way that does not
require special hardware.

	If such a mechanism exists, then the pager could have all of
the abilities of the current programs, and even support new ideas.

I don't know if I would like it of not, but you could have your pager
automatically pop up a new window everytime the data being displayed
was more than a certain size.

>The real world is that paging worked in a reasonably popular variant of
>V7 UNIX on plain ASCII terminals ten years ago; for *every* program.

What every happened to this feature? Why did it disappear from the two
main strains?

--
Bruce G. Barnett	<barnett at crd.ge.com>   uunet!crdgw1!barnett