On 06/13/1999 (14:52:24), [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > * An answer to why if this problem has been around for
> > such a long time (and has been discussed before), that why
> > a solution hasn't been provided.
> > * An actual solution to the problem.
>
> This has nothing to do with whether or not slang writes spaces. It
> has everything to do with how your terminal interprets displayed text
> on the screen. For example, suppose your terminal is a vt100 and
> slang sends it the following:
>
> ESC[1;1H Move cursor to 1,1
> ESC[K Erase to end of line
> Foo Write Foo
> ESC[1;10H Goto 1,10
> Bar Write Bar
>
> This will cause the the top line to appear as:
>
> Foo Bar
Correct. Most terminal emulation software will throw spaces
inbetween Foo and Bar as to ensure a decent way of copy/pasting
text to a clipboard or etc.
My concern/complaint is not about spaces between two words
or characters. My concern is with this:
A string is "Hello", terminated with \0. If this string is
printf()'d, it outputs "Hello". The terminal sees 5 characters,
and therefore lets you select 5. Five are only sent over the
tty as well.
ncurses (and slang) applications are not doing this. I have
Email messages which consist of lines such as (excluding
double-quotes):
"From: Stan Ryckman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>"
However, when this line is actually output to the terminal
with mutt (slang, ncurses, whatever people want to claim it
is), the output is actually the following:
"From: Stan Ryckman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "
(NOTE: This is taken from mutt's builtin pager using ncurses.
Slang does the same, but to a more verbose effect -- meaning,
it does it more commonly than ncurses. But, both do it!).
People are blaming slang for this behaviour. Possibly the
problem is with slang, and with ncurses as well.
> Finally, it is beyond the scope of the screen management library to
> second-guess the context of what the application displays on the
> screen. The goal of the library is to manage the display in a way
> that is as efficient as possible. The same comment should apply to the
If your string is 25 characters long, and you are using a
terminal window which is 132 characters wide, is it efficient
to print out 107 blank spaces at the end of the line? :-) It
may be on a LAN, but not over a dialup.
> If you are using rxvt, then apply the patch that I posted earlier. If
> you are using some other terminal, you will have to look elsewhere for
> a solution.
I have witnessed the aforementioned problem using the following
software:
CRT
SecureCRT
Windows Telnet
FreeBSD console
Linux console
Sun console
I spent 2 days tinkering with my termcap entry, thinking it
was plausible that the thing was padding spaces out on the
end of each line -- however, this is not the case.
Sidenote: Editors such as vim, elvis, and stock vi do not
portrait this kind-of behaviour. vim and elvis both use
ncurses :-).
It is definitely a problem in either mutt, slang, or
ncurses: or all three.
--
| Jeremy Chadwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| Parodius Networking [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| UNIX System Administrator http://www.parodius.com/ |
