POSIX bashing (actually cooked vs raw or cbreak mode)

Geoff Collyer geoff at world.std.com
Thu Apr 11 05:22:26 AEST 1991


Curtis Yarvin:
>Isn't it better to get the choice out of the kernel, and let each
>application decide what it wants?

No, it isn't.  The last thing I want is each application having a
different idea of what I have to type to erase input (for example).
`Gee, now I'm in emacs, so I have to type control-A control-K to erase my
line.' Ugh.  One of the great wins of Unix is that it lets the *user*
make such choices, not J. Random Losing Application (unless it switches
to cbreak mode, which is becoming distressingly common).  This is one
reason that cooked mode is a win (fewer context switches being the other
obvious one) and that shell globbing is a win: they are done centrally,
by one piece of code, so they work uniformly and all applications and
users benefit.  (Yeah, we know about "restore *".)
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff



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