resetting terminal size.

[Paul Davey]

In article <10958 at unix.SRI.COM> ric at ace.sri.com (Richard Steinberger) writes:

   Sometimes I telnet/rlogin into a Unix machine from an X-terminal or
   workstation.  The windows are often bigger than 32 lines.  I'd like to be
   able to use "all" of this space while working on the Unix computer, and have
   tried "stty rows 32".  This seems to register the row entry ("stty all"
   shows rows as set to 32), but there is no change in the way the window is
   used (i.e., the bottom 8 lines remain unused, only the top 24 are active.)
   Is there another approach I should be using?  Usually, TERM is set to vt100,
   and eval `tset -s Q` is done at login.  Thanks for any help or
   suggestions.

   -ric steinberger
   ric at ace.sri.com

Look in /etc/termcap to see if you can use xterm instead of vt100 as
the value for TERM.

My system has, as well as the standard xterm,

X0|xterm-24|vs100s|xterm terminal emulator (small)(X window system):\
        :co#80:li#24:tc=xterm:
X1|xterm-32|vs100|xterm terminal emulator (medium)(X window system):\
        :co#96:li#32:tc=xterm:
X2|xterm-45|vs100-w|xterm terminal emulator (large)(X window system):\
        :co#144:li#45:tc=xterm:
For 24, 32 and 45 line xterms in /etc/termcap. 

If you have X11 on the Unix machine use the X11 resize program.
>From resize(1),
     Resize prints a shell command for setting the TERM and
     TERMCAP environment variables to indiciate the current size
     of xterm window from which the command is run.

in a C-shell alias like
	alias rs 'eval `resize` '

If you don't have resize you may have to settle for several
/etc/termcap (or on system V /usr/lib/terminfo) entries, in several
sizes.  

If you are lucky enought to have the Korn shell (or you are a Bourne
shell user) then you should be able to trap the WINCH signal (32 on
some machines, it may have a different name/number on your machine) to
execute the resize automatically when you resize the window. eg,
	trap 'eval `resize` ' 32

This can't be done in a C-shell since it doesn't have a general signal
trapping capability.

In ksh you may also want to reset the ksh COLUMNS variable (used by
the command line editing) by something like,
	trap 'eval `resize`; set `stty size`; COLUMNS=$1' 32

There may be a better ways of coping with large or changing-size
windows than this so I'm cross posting to comp.windows.x.

--

 Regards,			paul at ixi.uucp           IXI Limited          
	 Paul Davey		...!uunet!ixi!paul      62-74 Burleigh Street
				+44 224 462 132 (fax)   Cambridge  U.K.      
 "These are interesting times"	+44 223 462 131 (vox)   CB1  1OJ             

-- 

 Regards,			paul at ixi.uucp           IXI Limited          
	 Paul Davey		...!uunet!ixi!paul      62-74 Burleigh Street
				+44 224 462 132 (fax)   Cambridge  U.K.