Interactive Background Processes

[Greg Woods]

In article <8037 at alice.UUCP> wilber at alice.UUCP writes:
>Greg Woods writes:
>>In article <8029 at alice.UUCP> wilber at alice.UUCP writes:
>>>[message expressing desire for interactive background processes]
>>
>>Unfortunately, a Unix without job control, layers, or such will not
>>provide the system facilities required for emacs to do the same.
>
>The Unix running on my 3b1 (a somewhat bowdlerized variant on SYS V 2.0)
>definately does not have job control (sigh) and, although there may be some
>version of layers available for this box, I don't have it.  Nonetheless my
>Emacs (GNU, version 18.49) runs multiple shell buffers just fine, thank you.
>It communicates with the shell processes via ptys.  (The pty drivers I use are
>a public domain version snarfed off the net.)  ....

That's cheating! ;-)  What I meant by "layers" was shl, and that to implement
it you must (?) have pty's or sxt's.  Jove on Xenix can't do interactive
background tasks.

I thought about trying the pty driver, but I'll be working with SVR3 soon, so
I shouldn't need them any more.

>>Fortunately, one of these "features" usually exists in every version of
>>Unix, though that doesn't mean emacs will work with it properly.
>
>See above.  Emacs doesn't need job control or layers to handle multiple shells,
>although at least on the 3b1 it does need ptys (attempting to link up with
>shell processes via pipes didn't work).

No, but it does need the facilities used by shell layers, see above. :-)

>>Unfortuantely, only a true window manager for X or NeWS, or layers (not
>>shell-layers) on a DMD terminal, or something similar, are easy enough
>>to use.  None of these are usefull on a dumb terminal at 1200 baud,
>>though layers is nearly so, it's just the terminal isn't very cheap nor dumb.

Maybe someone will write (free) layers software for a PC? (hint hint...)
As a matter of fact, it should come "free" with Unix.  There are lots of PCs.

>Emacs isn't that tough to figure out -- no mice to slow you down, no cute
>little bit mapped pictures of trash cans or rolodexes to confuse and distract
>you.  Remember, Emacs, like Unix, is asymptotically user friendly.  And it can
>be used at 1200 baud if you're desperate, although that is admittedly very
>painful.  (I didn't realize you were stuck with a 1200 baud link.)

I didn't say I don't like emacs!  In fact I use it at 1200 baud nearly
every day. ;-)  Can we all say ISDN?

>Bob Wilber   Work: UUCP: {allegra, mtune, ihnp4}!gauss!wilber
>                   ARPA: wilber at research.att.com
-- 
						Greg Woods.

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