Re: [dev] [st] goals / non-goals for st?

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 9:28 PM, Anselm R Garbe<garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/22 Ray Kohler <ataraxia937_AT_gmail.com>:
>> I'm rather curious on where st will go, and what kinds of things other
>> terminals do that it will or won't do.
>
> Well my plan is to achieve *good* xterm compliance and 256 color
> support. As you know xterm is not really fully vt100 or vt220
> compliant, so that's also not a goal of st.
Full xterm support will be difficult. There are lots of features in
its terrible source code. Just check the official README, it's kind of
scary:

> Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
>
>
> This is undoubtedly the most ugly program in the distribution. It was one of
> the first "serious" programs ported, and still has a lot of historical baggage.
> Ideally, there would be a general tty widget and then vt102 and tek4014
> subwidgets so that they could be used in other programs. We are trying to
> clean things up as we go, but there is still a lot of work to do.

>> In particular:
>> - Is a scrollback buffer objectionable in principle, such that we
>> should expect to "just use GNU screen"?
IMHO the scrollback buffer is useless since you can use different
tools (as you said) to achieve that ($PAGER, screen, etc).

>> - Will it implement enough of xterm's capabilities that I could lie
>> about $TERM and expect it to mostly work? I log into many remote
>> machines of various OS types and ages, and some of them don't make it
>> easy to install user-specific terminfo entries.
GNU screen handle this by fallbacking to vt100. See
<http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/package/epics/extensions/iocConsole/screen.1.html#lbAN>
Received on Sun Aug 23 2009 - 21:41:43 UTC