ugh.book

116 Terminal Insanity

one place, by a device driver. Not every program or programmer is letter-

perfect: operations like reading or writing to the disk should be done only

in one place within the operating system, where they can be written once,

debugged, and left alone. Why should terminals be treated any differently?

Forcing programmers to be aware of how their programs talk to terminals

is medieval, to say the least. Johnny Zweig put it rather bluntly:

Date: 2 May 90 17:23:34 GMT

From: [email protected] (Johnny Zweig)

Subject: /etc/termcap

Newsgroups: alt.peeves^2

In my opinion as a scientist as well as a software engineer, there is no

reason in the world anyone should have to know /etc/termcap even

EXISTS, let alone have to muck around with setting the right envi-

ronment variables so that it is possible to vi a file. Some airhead has

further messed up my life by seeing to it that most termcaps have the

idea that “xterm” is an 80x65 line display. For those of us who use

the X WINDOWS system to display WINDOWS on our worksta-

tions, 80x65 makes as much sense as reclining bucket seats on a

bicycle—they are too goddamn big to fit enough of them on the

screen. This idiot should be killed twice.

It seems like figuring out what the hell kind of terminal I am using is

not as hard as, say, launching nuclear missiles to within 10 yards of

their targets, landing men on the moon or, say, Tetris.

Why the hell hasn’t this bull been straightened out after 30 goddamn

years of sweat, blood, and tears on the part of people trying to write

software that doesn’t give its users the heebie-jeebies? And the first

person who says “all you have to do is type ‘eval resize’ ” gets a big

sock in the nose for being a clueless geek who missed the point. This

stuff ought to be handled 11 levels of software below the level at

which a user types a command—the goddamned HARDWARE

ought to be able to figure out what kind of terminal it is, and if it

can’t it should put a message on my console saying, “You are using

piss-poor hardware and are a loser; give up and get a real job.”

—Johnny Terminal

(^2) Forwarded to UNIX-HATERS by Olin Siebert.