how do I tell the size of a pseudoterm window?

[Guy Harris]

>I don't know what AT&T's future windowing plans are; they've announced
>(with Sun) a commitment to the "Open Look" but then everybody and his
>brother is pushing some window interface right now.  Too bad if X11
>pushes out the in-many-ways-superior layers approach.

Too bad, then, I guess, because as far as I know AT&T plans to go with
X11 or X11/NeWS; they're doing the Xt-based implementation of the Open
Look interface.

What do you mean by "the ... layers approach"?

	1) The notion of a windowing terminal? People are already building
	   terminals with X11 in them, so if you don't like the idea of
	   having the computer on which you run your programs also
	   painting bits on the screen, X11 doesn't force you to accept
	   that idea.  (I presume you can, under layers, somehow arrange
	   to run a program on a machine other than the one to which
	   your layers terminal is connected and have it interact
	   with layers just as if it were running on that machine; if
	   not, X11 does a *better* job than layers does in that
	   instance.)

	2) The ability to run some of your window system in the
	   terminal, including downloaded user-interface code?  You can
	   do that with NeWS, assuming you're willing to write the
	   downloaded code in PostScript (or have some translator that
	   will generate PostScript for you - is there a tool that will
	   do that for you?).  You could also arrange to do something
	   like that on at least some boxes that run X11, probably, via
	   the extensions mechanism, assuming you had some way of
	   downloading code to implement the extension.

	3) Some aspect of the user interface of the window system
	   provided by layers?  X11 doesn't dictate much of the user
	   interface; you might well be able to implement the layers
	   user interface atop X11.

>Layers aren't just pseudo-terminals, they're much more powerful.

Oh, really?  Can I use layers to implement, say, 4.xBSD's "script"?

I'm not sure layers and pseudo-ttys are the same sort of beast, so I'm
not sure you can say that one is "more powerful" than the other.