Job Control (a la csh/ksh) from within C

[Brandon S. Allbery]

As quoted from <11240 at smoke.BRL.MIL> by gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn):
+---------------
| Your H19 is probably a hopeless case, but even so there are window
| managers that work with ordinary CRT terminals.  I don't know how
| good they are (I suspect: not very).
+---------------

I haven't yet gotten a version of our OS with working pty's (and wouldn't know
how to use them if I did; see my previous message in this thread -- I'm not
convinced that the clone device is a reasonable way to make ptys), so I
haven't played with "screen" yet.

I *do* use the commercial product JSB MultiView at work on VT220 clones.  It
has some warts in the version we have:  it tends to mishandle the status line
(which can lead to a core dump, producing an immediate end-of-session as all
your open windows are blasted into oblivion); it can't handle complex
terminals like the Falco 5000 which uses a sort of combined Wyse-60/VT300
escape sequence set with enhancements -- give it all the equivalences for
escape sequences and it dumps core; it doesn't support terminals with magic
cookies (that's okay; neither do I ;-); sometimes its screen management is,
shall we say, erratic.  But by and large it's quite usable; I find it
invaluable.  Please note that I haven't missed job control, even though I use
systems (e.g. uunet) which have it.

I have heard of at least one non-commercial program (BOSS) which is supposed
to be similar to MultiView.  (I'm interested in more information on it; I like
my status line ;-)

In any case, it *is* possible to have usable windowing on character-based
terminals.  Sure, you can't open a window with a graphical load average
indicator in it, but you can do a heck of a lot with it nonetheless.  (In
particular, it's *the* answer to Mac DA's and PClone TSR's in the Unix world.)

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc	     allbery at NCoast.ORG
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