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LYNX-DEV lynx and screen


From: Eli's redistribution point
Subject: LYNX-DEV lynx and screen
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 97 13:19 EST

As a user of screen, I think it would be handy if lynx were screen
aware. I am prepared to actually sit down and code this, so this is
slightly better than idle speculation about useful new features.

Since a lot of people probably don't know what screen is, let
me explain.  The man page starts the description with

        Screen is a full-screen window manager that
        multiplexes a physical terminal between several
        processes (typically interactive shells).

It is a highly useful way of running a lot of programs concurrently
from one dial- or telnet-in shell account. Some Unixes, I think
just Sys V R2 and Sys V R3, have a shl command that is similar
in function. shl:screen :: ex:vi. Screen does lots of useful stuff
such as maintaining the full visual display when jumping around,
which shl does not.

I don't think I would be able to get this out for a 2.7 release,
the easy stuff can already be sort of done: setting your telnet
application to a shell script which checks if $STY is defined
and runs "screen telnet" instead of "telnet" if it is.

Proper screen support would allow *at minimum* some way of
easily starting new screens with starting URLs from lynx.
Something like having a key stroke when hit on a link causes
"screen lynx [current lynx options] {URL}" to be run. This
may not be obvious to the nonscreen user, but that will
only work as expected if the parent lynx was already running
from screen.

Better support would include some way for the two lynxes to
communicate, say a socket between them so that the child can
inherit all the cahced pages and history of the parent. At
that point I would be content to let the two of them drop
the connection and diverge, but maybe it would be useful to
keep it. Full multithreaded support would make this whole
thing less resource intensive and easier, but that is a lot
to ask and I am not quite sure how it would work with screen.
Maybe if the child just was a front end relying on the
parent to do everything and just displaying the results and
piping back the interactions. Still sounds like using threads
would be too much work with screen limitations.

So while I am still planning this coding, are there other
uses people would like to have this put to? Maybe default
all mailto: and news: methods to appear in a different
window. Maybe put code in to allow whatever tag it is that
causes netscape to open a new window to also work in lynx?
(Note: I really dislike that feature.)

Elijah
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