Re: [newbie] terminal handling facilities

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 08:36:56AM +0200, Klaus Ripke wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 11:59:59PM +0100, David Given wrote:
> > What about SIGWINCH? Without that, your programs will be extremely antisocial.
> well, there not many terminals but xterm to change size at all.

You're trying to downplay the importance of supporting window resizing
by claiming that "not many terminals support it"?  Xterm/rxvt, and
equivalents in other systems over ssh connections (eg. Putty), is
probably by far the most common type of terminal in use today.  That's
a whole lot of terminals.  The only ones I can think of that wouldn't
support it would be actual, text terminals (eg. the Linux console).

> Then, for some applications is does not make much sense to use
> a size other than a standard size and/or at least one would not
> change it constantly, so having to type, say, ^L is acceptable.

Having to type ^L to have an application recognize a window size
change is not acceptable.  It's 2005; handling this automatically
has been standard practice for a very long time.  I'm in screen,
with nine screens open inside; if I resize my terminal, all nine
resize.  I'm not about to cycle through each one hitting ^L.  (For
line-based applications, eg. readline, ^L also tends to clear the
screen, which resizing shouldn't do.)

> Finally, if a small piece of C is used for the ioctl,
> it does not hurt to add three lines to turn SIGWINCH into ^L.
> But extremely antisocial - I don't think so.

"Extremely antisocial" is a pretty accurate description of an ncurses-ish
application that doesn't support SIGWINCH.

-- 
Glenn Maynard