Date: Wed, 04 Dec 1996 03:43:33 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Cc: fenner@parc.xerox.com, ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Ports INDEX browser update Message-ID: <1455.849699813@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 04 Dec 1996 16:22:00 %2B1030." <199612040552.QAA15727@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
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> Jordan K. Hubbard stands accused of saying: > > It also occurs to me that if you're really masoch^H^H^H^H^Hinterested > > in odd solutions, you can always build and use the two widgets from > > "emu" in our ports collection. It was built specifically for this > > purpose, with "xterm" equivalent functionality derived from several > > cooperating widgets. > > That sounds pretty handy! How do you think that it would compare against > expect and its terminal emulation? (if it does any, for that matter...?) Heh. This is where you will probably fall over kicking spastically, like a cockroach that's just been sprayed with a noxious substance (not that I am otherwise comparing you to an annoying household insect which feeds on grease :-). The emulation is entirely programmable, using a little stack-based language (called "IOP") which eats terminal escape sequences and generates operation requests for the canvas widget. It reads the emulation "program" from the X resource database, and in this way a full VT220 emulator is provided. We didn't like the idea that xterm's vt100 emulation was hardcoded, so I designed a little language for it. :-) If you're actually interested in figuring this out, and it's not nearly as complex as it sounds, I'll be happy to provide any and all technical assistance. It's in /usr/ports/x11/emu in case you missed the location earlier. > I think that it's a core technology requirement for the short-medium > term insofar as our FreeSAM aims are concerned; we need to be able to > run things like the YP map makes &c. and put their output where they > can be seen. Yep, this will do that really well. The main motivation I originally had for writing this (with Michael Elbel as co-conspirator) was the fact that xterm's "slave mode" is an unholy bitch to use, and I wanted a set of widgets to link into my application (an early xgdb implementation) which would simply provide callback handlers for trivially splicing in I/O streams and displaying them. Along the way, it just kind of grew into a complete xterm replacement with a programmable escape sequence parser. I always threatened to provide an HP2640 terminal emulator resource string for it, just to prove it could be done as easily as a VT220, but I somehow never quite found the time. :-) Jordan
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