Re: The Chthulhoid horror that is keyboard handling in Unix

[Magnus Eriksson <magetoo%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2010, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> > One thing I've been thinking about is whether one could write a "terminal"
> > for X that doesn't suck; something to replace the terminal emulators

> Do you not see there's a major catch-22 there in your idea?

You mean talking to "non-adapted" programs?  Yes, I see that.


The big hurdle as I see it is full screen applications; they would have to 
be "ported", or written.  Yeah, not so trivial.  Perhaps one could start 
with providing a curses interface and get some for free, or maybe not. 
(Could that work?)


Regular (stdin/stdout, nothing more advanced control character-wise than, 
say, carriage return and linefeed) programs and utilities wouldn't even 
need to know anything has changed, although you would have to provide 
character set conversion.

A shell would be needed.  I think that if you have that and compatibility 
with the standard utilities then that is already something worthwhile. 
That, and a vi clone, and I could actually see someone using it without 
being forced to.


Anyway, just brainstorming.  A bit off topic here, but if anyone is 
interested or wants to explain why it can't possibly work, I'd like to 
hear more off-list.


> If you totally escape the unix/posix mindset then you can achieve the
> kind of thing you were describing.

Mmm.  But then nobody in Unixland would be even remotely interested, and 
the idea would be forgotten.  (Back to the drawing board.)


MAgnus