Re: Desiderata. [LONG, sorry]

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 08:42:08PM +0100, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
> Ged Haywood wrote:
> 
> > (a) Control of the shape of the cursor - yes, I know it might involve
...
> >= 5.0 (shouldn't be a problem today). For xterms I'm not sure which
> ones support it.

None that I know of.  scoterm probably does, etc., but none of the xterms do.
(Like anything else, it's doable - but I did look into it last year and saw
it's not a 1-hour job - more like a day).

> > (b) Control of NUMLOCK and CAPSLOCK if they exist.  And SCROLLLOCK and
...
> I don't think ncurses has any support for this. For a Linux only
> solution you might want to look at the setleds program (I think it
> uses some ioctl's).

It's unlikely that we'd add this, since it would be very machine-specific.
Most platforms don't provide any support for it.
 
> > [Q2] It seems daft to have to maintain my system using two different
> > screen packages so I thought about porting ncurses to DOS.  This gets
> > a mention in the ncurses TO-DO file but it seems like it's been just
> > a mention for several years now.  Has anyone picked up the gauntlet?
> 
> I've heard about a port to DJGPP, but I don't know details. There's
> also PDCurses which runs on Dos, Windows, etc., and also under X11
> without an xterm (i.e., if you have problems in xterms, you might
> want to try it as an alternative). The interface is compatible, and
> I routinely compile my programs with both ncurses for console and
> PDCurses for X11 (and Dos if I ever need it again).

There are some problems with PDCurses X11 (I've run into them using lynx).
But it does run well enough to demonstrate, so I have added that as an
option for the curses programs which I'm maintaining.
 
> > [PS] Since joining the list I have received truckloads of SPAM through
> > the list server.  Is this a common experience?
> 
> Unfortunately yes. :-(

The alternative is to close the list to nonsubscribers.  (I don't think
that's 100% effective since I've gotten spam on that type of list as well).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net