[dev] suggestion

From: Stuart Morrow <morrow.stuart_AT_googlemail.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:56:00 +0000

You've all seen the "terminal-aware sam" on the website:

> It has been suggested that “…a curses interface for the
> sam protocol would be interesting and perhaps even useful…”

I have a different suggestion, arguably better because it works as
a frontend to ANY stdin/stdout program.

You know the way when a terminal is in line mode, read calls don't
receive anything until you hit enter? It's nice.

And you know the way there's stuff (rlwrap) that simulates line mode
by itself by setting the REAL tty to raw mode, but then intermediating
reads between the tty your program, cooking the input while it does?

My idea is to have something like rlwrap, but which runs full-screen, like
vi, cursor addressing and whatnot, which can provide hold mode in addition
to line mode. You run ed or sam -d in it, and you've basically got the nice-
ness of those editors, which also having something similar to a screen editor
on the terminal.

It *should* work - I remind you at this point that hold mode is what made
edmail usable back before acme mail (or help mail) was invented. I think
you can guess by the name what kind of interface "edmail" has if you've
never heard of edmail...

At the risk of embiggening this email, I will inline an explanation of
"hold mode":

In line mode, your program doesn't know what you've typed until you've
hit enter.
In hold mode, your program doesn't know what you've typed until you've
left hold mode.
You can type multiple lines in hold mode, and if needed you can go
back multiple lines
and edit them before allowing ed/sam -d to read what you typed.

And it's just a wrapper so it just works with any program.

It's not the sort of thing you'd use if you had graphics available and access to
an editor with the mouse, but it basically handles the same situation
as what the
original suggestion was...with the advantage of not being tied into
sam and only sam.

I will NOT write this, because I'm not some grey-on-black fixed-width terminal
weenie that thinks their hand will fall off if they touch the mouse
(as all of you
still seem to be), and also because:

From: erik quanstrom <quanstro_AT_qua...>
> if you build something you need, then at least one person
> will use it. if you build something you think people need,
> there's no such guarentee.

but I AM throwing the idea out there because I think it's a better one
than what's
on the website.

Stuart
Received on Fri Jan 18 2013 - 12:56:00 CET