Input Line Editing

[jbs at eddie.MIT.EDU]

In article <59697 at sun.uucp> guy at gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes
(quoting an article by Doug Alan):

>> There should also be a version of X that runs [...] on a normal, 
>> dumb terminal.
>One of the "most basic features" of X11 is the ability to draw things such as
>lines, and curves, and so on and so forth, with pixel-level resolution.  I
>would be very surprised to hear about *ANY* X11 client that could live with the
>minimum set of X11 requests that could be implemented on a "dumb
>terminal"

Consider an 80x24 terminal with a 256 character font.

If this is viewed as an 80x24 bitmapped display with 8 bits per pixel,
it should be possible to run X on it.  To make such a thing useful,
you need the server to process fonts as pixmaps (I don't know if there
are any servers that currently do this--it would be also be useful for
anti-aliased fonts on a normal workstation).  The font size would be 1
pixel by 1 pixel.  VT100's, which have double-width and double-width,
double-height fonts would have 2 by 1 and 2 by 2 fonts as well.

The lack of a pointer is another problem that can be dealt with in a
variety of creative ways.

What is wrong with this scheme?  Please omit reasons like "You
wouldn't want to do that because character-based terminals are
worthless," etc.

Jeff Siegal