Getting termcap to work right with smaller 3B1 fonts

[Jim Rosenberg]

Eureka!!  When mounting a smaller font than 9x12 into slot 0 -- and no other
fonts in any of the higher slots -- I've had some occasional problems with
termcap.  ^D in vi does all kinds of strange things, but ^F works just fine.
I think I now have this one wired.  It seems that termcap -- at least as
utilized by vi -- can get into a situation where it counts on the fact that if
it just keeps printing beyond the number of columns on the screen, the
terminal will wrap.  (I seem to recall a termcap entry dealing with this for
VT100's, which have some kind of mode in which they don't wrap.)  If you've
set a smaller font and resized the window with the mouse there's a good chance
you may have a window which is just a few too many pixels larger than the
number of columns your termcap entry says you have.  This is just enough to
confuse termcap.  When using vi with a small font the best approach is to use
windy to set your window size to the exact amount of pixels needed.  If you
need to move the window with the mouse you can bring it up -f40 and then move
it with the mouse after setting its size with windy; but resizing with the
mouse is dangerous to the health of termcap.

Well, much to the distress of my weekend, I have cooked up an 8x9 font, which
I now have loaded in slot 0 as my boot font.  It's large enough to be readable
but small enough to give some flexibility.  80 columns will fit in a bordered
window (I groused about this, so OK, I did something about it!).  Right now I
have a root shell on the bottom 8 lines of the screen in an unbordered window,
and all the other shells have unbordered 24 x 80 windows in the top 24 lines
of the screen.  At the right of the screen is this "gray" rectangle just
sitting there hungry as hell for something interesting to be done with icons.
I might hack the source to iconifier to collapse into a window off to the
right, if I get ambitious.

Net gods willing, the next message will be the 8x9 font.  I dunno how people
feel about posting something that large to comp.sys.att -- on unix-pc I will
post it to unix-pc.sources -- but based on the recent traffic a number of 3B1
folk who read comp.sys.att aren't getting unix-pc.* and comp.sys.att seems
like the only reasonable place to post it for the general net.
-- 
 Jim Rosenberg
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