ASCII menu in loader/frames.4th

[Jeremy Chadwick]

Just an idea I'd throw out there (-hackers seemed like the best place
to discuss this):

The current loader.conf defaults to having the fbsdbw logo and the
menuing system appear.  One of the "issues" is that the character set
used to draw the menu box frames is CP437 ("IBM PC/DOS character set").
This doesn't look so great for those of us who choose to use ISO-8859-1
encoding or UTF-8 encoding; I mainly use PuTTY to connect to my FreeBSD
boxes, and to get on serial console, use cu/tip or console.

I think it would be useful to have a ASCII-ised version of the
frame/menuing stuff in (I think?) frames.4th.  The difference:

CP437:

 ³  3. Boot FreeBSD in Safe Mode           ³
 ³  4. Boot FreeBSD in single user mode    ³
 ³                                         ³
 ³  Select option, [Enter] for default     ³
 ³  or [Space] to pause timer  2           ³
 ÀÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÙ

ASCII:

 |  3. Boot FreeBSD in Safe Mode           |
 |  4. Boot FreeBSD in single user mode    |
 |                                         |
 |  Select option, [Enter] for default     |
 |  or [Space] to pause timer  2           |
 +-----------------------------------------+

One could enable use of this with some loader.conf variable like
loader_frames="ascii" or (default) loader_frames="cp437", possibly
even a "vt100" type (using VT100 line-drawing characters).

I'm not familiar with forth, otherwise I'd come up with a patch.  Maybe
I'll try learning it (argh, another language to learn...), or hack
around a bit.

Comments?

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |