vt/ansi codes

Erik Trulsson ertr1013 at student.uu.se
Mon Jul 14 11:56:31 PDT 2003


On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 06:41:28PM +0000, abc at ai1.anchorage.mtaonline.net wrote:
> Re:Starting with Unix (Score:4, Insightful)
> by spitzak (4019) on Sunday April 27, @01:18PM (#5819797)
> (http://www.cinenet.net/~spitzak)
> 
> Terminal driver design is certainly a stupid part of Unix. Back when this was
> written there certainly was a serious mess of terminals which would actually
> fail non-gracefully on output designed for other terminals.
> 
> But this is not true today. Today EVERY SINGLE TERMINAL IN THE WORLD
> understands ANSI escape sequences at full speed and will not choke (and will
> likely display) on all ISO-8859-1 characters. It is time to scrap every single

Not correct. Most terminals (and terminal emulators) might work as you
describe, but not all. Far from it.
Remember that there are lots of old hardware and software out there
that is actually used every day.  

> option in the editing portion of the terminal driver. And start accepting
> *both* ^H and ^? as backspace.
> 
> I would agree that in this area, morbid fear of being incompatable is
> completely freezing development. Sometimes advancement is achieved by DELETING
> code, not just by adding it.

-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se


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