On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Brett Lymn wrote:

# Vi broke because of a habit you have that I do not share.  I rarely ^Z
# out of vi because I either use X or virtual consoles.  It was not an
# obvious test to me, one of the other people on the curses team did
# spot the problem and we were working on a solution.  The problem was
# hardly a show stopper - if you went forward a page the screen would
# update properly.

Hiya, Brett.

I don't know about anyone else, but I suspect there are quite a few
people who grew up either using System V's abomination of shell levels%
or Berkeley Job Control on an 80x24 (cursor-mappable) glass tty and so
have had to share their terminal with many processes.  I know I cut
my teeth on an adm5 hooked to a VAX 11/750 running 4.[1-3] BSD.

Those habits DO carry over to X, believe it or not.  Yes, I run a few
windows -- typically anywhere from three to eight, but no more.  I find
it much easier to suspend and hit something else than to switch active
windows, and this is largely because it's in general@ easier for me to
hit a couple of keys than to move a mouse, select a window and continue
there, as well as the fact that if you're doing test-check-test operations
(as in the final cleanup/debugging of a script or program designed for
tty interaction) you maintain a lot of inter-command context (history,
et al., and its substitutions, or a linedit-based history interface).

This has already been pointed out, but it completes the thought -- sorry
for the redundancy.  If you have a large xterm (80x66++) and the files you
are editing are shorter than this, it's kind of hard to go forward a page.

[I like 80x34, myself, but then I'm a SPARC kind of guy and it maps nicely
to the console dimensions.]

				--*greywolf;

[%] shell levels were an abomination -- even Greg Woods would agree with
    that.  This is not to imply that System V was in and of itself an
    abomination -- sh, echo, date and touch from System V beat Berkeley's
    original versions hands down.

[@] I say 'in general' here, because I have to switch between Solam^Hris,
    HP-UX, IRIX and *BSD, and there are no provisions in DTE for using
    Alt-TAB switching if you use focus-chases-mouse mode [I loathe
    "click-to-focus" mode] -- hitting the TSTP key is just much easier.

P.S. I'm largely keyboard bound, can you tell? :-)