118 Terminal Insanity
Alan Bawden has this to say about the situation:
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 91 14:47:50 EST
From: Alan Bawden <[email protected]>
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: Don’t tell me about cursesWhat this is saying is so brain damaged it brings tears to my eyes. On
the one hand, Unix requires every program to manually generate the
escape sequences necessary to drive the user’s terminal, and then on
the other hand Unix makes it hard to send them. It’s like going to a
restaurant without a liquor license where you have to bring your own
beer, and then the restaurant gives you a dribble-glass to drink it
from.Customizing your terminal settings
Try to make sense of this, and you’ll soon find your.cshrc and.login files
accumulating crufty snippets of kludgy workarounds, each one designed to
handle a different terminal or type of network connection. The problem is
that without a single coherent model of terminals, the different programs
that do different tasks must all be told different vital statistics. telnet and
rlogin track one set of customizations, tset another set, and stty yet a third.
These subsystems act as though they each belong to different labor unions.
To compound the problem, especially in the case of stty, the subsystems
take different commands and options depending on the local chapter they
belong to, that is, which Unix they operate on. (The notion of a transparent
networked environment in Unix is an oxymoron.) Our following correspon-
dent got hit with shrapnel from all these programs:
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 1991 11:06-0500
From: “John R. Dunning”
<[email protected]>
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: Unix vs terminal settingsSo the other day I tried to telnet into a local Sun box to do something
or other, but when I brought up emacs, it displayed a little itty-bitty
window at the top of my virtual terminal screen. I got out of it and
verified that my TERM and TERMCAP environment variables were
set right, and tried again, but nope, it was convinced my terminal was
only a few lines high. I thrashed around for a while, to no avail, then
finally gave up in disgust, sent mail off to the local Unix wizard (who
shall remain nameless, though I think he's on this list) asked how the