Pagination in TTY driver

[Richard Artym]

[Munch.]

Goodness!  All this time you poor souls have been using tty handlers
without built-in pagination?  We've had a paginating handler on our
PDP-11 since V6 days, and the current V7 also has it.  Alas, our
Codata's Uniplus V7 doesn't, nor of course does our VAX's BSD4.2,
and as a result I find it quite exasperating to use these supposedly
"better" machines rather than the old PDP.

I strongly support henry at utzoo's words on this topic, and would add that
paging utilities like 'more' should really be viewed as a terrible
kludge. In the Unix way of working, nearly all the output arriving
at the vdu is useful information meant for reading, in contrast to
the old-fashioned methods which produced huge reams of output with
very little content meant for human consumption.  (If you don't
recognize this, you haven't discovered pipes and filters!)  To have
correctly generated the desired output only to find that it scrolls
off the page because the eye can't keep up with the computer is
ridiculous in my opinion; since this is the normal state of affairs,
the solution should be provided by default.  Where and how it's
implemented is a separate issue, although most will agree that for
efficiency and simplicity the best place to put the code is in the
tty handler.  (In our handler, ^P allows you to toggle the pagination
on and off on the fly, it's automatically reset on receiving a CR or NL
as input, and it can be turned off altogether with "stty page 0".)

I'm perplexed as to why AT&T and Berkeley never picked up on this approach,
which was widely used here in Europe (EUUG V7 I think).  A paginating
tty handler improves overall ease of use dramatically, without any
exaggeration.

-- 
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> Rich Artym, Elec.Eng., Univ.College of Swansea, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, UK. <
>  UUCP : {UK}!ukc!reading!cybavax!rartym ; JANET : rartym at swxa/000060601800  <
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