Re: lynx-dev Re: ^Ve considered harmful

[dickey]

> 
> Bela>> Lynx also works with various OS's native curses, some of which do 
> *not*  
> Bela>> handle this correctly.  So if you use ESC for a quote char, be 
> prepared  
> Bela>> for endless niggling bugs on older systems, slowly dwindling as the  
> Bela>> years go by...  
...
> I know, from my years in SCO Support, that customers always had trouble 
> writing curses programs that could interpret ESC as a separate command. 
> It would always delay a whole second before accepting a standalone ESC. 

There's (in several implementations of curses) a variable ESCDELAY,
which is used to control that (i.e., the nominal timeout in milliseconds).
ncurses implements that.

> That may have changed in newer releases, and there may always have been 
> a workaround (I forget -- seems like there was, but it was something 
> complex and prone to failure).  But certainly, by default and on some 
> versions of the library, ESC was a bad choice of command character. 

agreed (if we don't use ESC, we can usually reduce ESCDELAY to whatever
the network will bear).

Of course vi (and clones) use ESC.  Recently I was puzzled about a problem
with the ESC key before I realized that I was getting extra delay time
because I was running in 'screen' (I'll revisit that though since screen's
delay was a factor of ten higher than I expect - but at least vile was
working properly ;-).
  
> >Bela< 


-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
address@hidden
http://www.clark.net/pub/dickey