Re: lynx-dev Slang - ncurses - TeraTerm (was Re: 'reloading' lynx.cfg)

[T.E.Dickey]

> 
> On or about 25 Jul, 1999, T.E.Dickey 
> <address@hidden> wrote: 
>  
> > > If the change was minor, I may just have missed it (I don't   
> > > use a very colorful scheme).  Also, might something specific  
> > > to the terminal emulator (TeraTerm, in my case) mask the      
> > > effect?                                                       
> > 
> > slang does not - yet - handle TeraTerm's color model.  (It 
> > works fine with ncurses - with an appropriate terminfo). 
>  
> I think you lost me there - every thing I use that does color 
> (mutt, vim. trn, and lynx (except for the (unsupported) lss, etc. 
> stuff)) seems to do OK with slang + TeraTerm. 

Teraterm is in the class (roughly half of all color terminals) that John
Davis has shunned for several years.  If you clear the display, the current
colors are not used to set the background color.  Applications (such as
vim) that write text-only, or programs that are displaying with a black
background, for example, are not noticeably broken.  Programs that fill the
background (such as Midnight Commander) look "odd".  (With Lynx, your color
scheme matters).

> The only reason I don't use ncurses is laziness, I guess.  I 
> futzed around with getting the terminfo right for a while, got 
> it at least mostly right, but another problem cropped up that 
> probably had nothing directly to do with ncurses, but that went 
> away when I rebuilt with slang.  I keep planning to go back and 
> pick it back up, but just haven't gotten around to it.  I much 
> prefer doing thing The Right Way, all else being equal. 
>  
> Just in case there's a quick answer, the problem with the ncurses 
> lynx was: 
>  
> I pipe an email from mutt to a script that filters the mail 
> through a html'izing perl script to a temp file, and then starts 
> lynx on the temp file.  The ncurses-built lynx I was using would 
> flash the page up and immediately exit.  Using mutt's wait_key 
> would hold the display on the screen, but that wasn't too useful 
> :). 

iirc, the setbuf initialization in ncurses flushes the pipe - discards
input - it's possible to code around this - by reading from a file
descriptor rather than a stream, but Lynx wouldn't work anyway
without some hacking (curses apps in general don't read from pipes)

otoh, if the Lynx slang configuration is doing something useful with a pipe,
I'm not aware of that - the only use I see for pipe input in Lynx as it
is now is some obscure logic in the command-line parsing.
  
> I figured it wasn't directly ncurses because starting lynx 
> that way also makes 'e'diting files impossible ("Warning: Input 
> not from tty...", vim's unusable) regardless of slang/ncurses, 
> didn't see anything obvious in the trace, I'm using the notorious 
> tcsh, I don't know much about shell programming, yadda yadda. 
> Just seemed like too many more likely possible explanations. 

Lynx would have to read the pipe data (and do whatever it needs to),
then reopen stdin from /dev/tty (or the equivalent on DOS or VMS).
It could be done with curses by doing this before initializing curses.
 
> One ncurses-specific factoid - TeraTerm does come with a box 
> drawing font ("Tera Special", I think it 's called), contrary to 
> the term description comment, as I recall it. 

I didn't notice that (I got line drawing by using one of M$'s fonts).

> --  
> Michael Warner 
> <address@hidden> 


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