Re: LYNX-DEV UNIXish and DOSish software

[Jason F. McBrayer]

>>>>> "JED" == John E Davis <address@hidden> writes:

JED> On Sun, 22 Mar 1998 02:01:38 -0500 (EST), Michael Sokolov
JED> <address@hidden> said:

>> As for curses, I plan to write a library that would look exactly
>> like BSD curses to the app but instead of picking escape sequences
>> from termcap and sending them to stdout would access the screen
>> directly.

JED>    Slang already does this for OS/2, MSDOS, and WIN95.  It uses
JED> termcap/terminfo only on Unix systems and writes ESC sequences to
JED> stdout only when running on Unix or VMS systems.

Yes, and it's entirely the Wrong Thing to do, on OS/2 at least.
Trying to do direct screen access means that the program can't be run
under XFree86/OS2, and also kills performance when running in a telnet
session (or an attached terminal) since the direct screen accesses
have to be remapped on the fly to ANSI control sequences by telnetd.
Hardcoding a PC-ANSI console would be better but still not perfect.
This is the main reason the OS/2-EMX version of Lynx uses ncurses and
not Slang or PDCurses, despite the advantages Slang offers.

On DOS it might be more justified, but I remember looking for ANSI
versions of programs like MicroEmacs during my DOS BBS days so that
they could run as BBS doors.

-- 
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| Jason F. McBrayer              address@hidden |
| The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill   |   
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