>suntools was an application that had a tremendous ammount of code
>support in the kernel. as a result, it ran fast. but it was highly
>non-portable as you are now finding out. pixrect is the fundamental
>object of suntools and it would be a real bitch to support this.

Well, not really that much kernel support (lines of code or functionality).

Suntools was developed when machines were slow, and there was no shared
memory.  The kernel support just provides shared memory, locking, and
cursor tracking.

If you wanted to reimplement it, it could be done with a very small driver,
with most of the work moved to a user process.

There is a public pixrect clone, or I guess the old libraries could be
used.


>> I realise that the majority of users out there think that suntools is quite
>> possibly the worst UI this side of NT, but one thing I discovered that it
>> has over BrokenWindows, and even X, is speed.  Suntools comes up blindingly
>> fast, especially on something like a Sparc 10 or Sparc 20.  I don't use it
>> as a user, but I used to like to run it as super-user when all I needed was
>> some quick windows.

This is the part I don't understand, because the X11R5 or X11R6 server
doesn't take that long to start up.  If your X startup is taking too long,
take a close look at your .xinitrc and .xserverrc, trim your font path,
use a smaller window manager, etc.

Once the X server is running, text display and scrolling in an xterm are
much faster than in a SunView shelltool, which tends to wipe out a couple
of seconds difference in startup time.


David DiGiacomo
former pixrect developer