Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Ashok Vadekar]

Apologies for violating sane quoting convention, but I'm working off a crapberry. 

Wrt to window titles: change your PS1 prompt to no longer reassign the title with the pwd (assuming you still have the default definition from /etc/profile (or similar)) and use the same escape sequience it uses (a standard vt100 documented one) to explicity assign your own title. 

The same can be done within a native dos box, but the explicit assignment has to be through a binary that calls SetConsoleTitle() because the native terminal does not support the escape code (as I recall).

----- Original Message -----
From: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com <cygwin-owner@cygwin.com>
To: cygwin@cygwin.com <cygwin@cygwin.com>
Sent: Thu Jan 15 23:21:31 2009
Subject: Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

Andy Koppe wrote:
> Lee D. Rothstein wrote:
>
>>  > "\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
>>  > "\e[1;5B": history-search-forward
>>
>> Perhaps I don't understand this 'bash' feature, but it doesn't
>> seem to work for me.
>
> Start typing a command, press Ctrl-Up, and it finds the previous line 
> in the history that started like that.
>
I'll work on that habit. Thanks.

>> I do lots of bash scripting including Windows/DOS commands, and I
>> can think of only one character cell app that ever gave me any
>> trouble from rxvt or xterm (whatever that app is -- I think a
>> Resource Kit app), I found a work-around and never needed it
>> again.
>
> 'net' is a troublesome command that's been mentioned, although it 
> seems to be ok for basic stuff. But I guess there might be still be a 
> few DOS fullscreen apps around. Turbo Pascal perhaps? But yeah, I'd 
> sooner implement tabs than worry about DOS apps. ;)
>
rudimentary 'net' works.


>>  > I didn't know xterm actually had a UI for this. Do people find
>>  > this useful?
>>
>> I've used it on occasion when I needed to scroll back through two
>> debugging runs of a text-mode (character cell) app (or debugging
>> statements).
>
> So your debug print macro or whatever would be switching screens?
>

No. Me at the terminal switches screens, using the options menu, before 
the second run.
 

>> What would be better for this and other problems, however, is a
>> feature that I would love: The ability to interactively, on the
>> fly change, the Title Bar/Task Bar Title to be clear on what each
>> Window is doing.
>
> Can you explain the "interactive" bit a bit more. Do you mean clicking 
> on the window title and start typing away at it?
>
Exactly what I had in mine.



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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Lee D. Rothstein]

Ashok Vadekar wrote:
> Apologies for violating sane quoting convention, but I'm working off a crapberry. 
>
> Wrt to window titles: change your PS1 prompt to no longer reassign the title with the pwd (assuming you still have the default definition from /etc/profile (or similar)) and use the same escape sequience it uses (a standard vt100 documented one) to explicity assign your own title. 
>   
I do that; doesn't fit that requirement.

E.g: echo -ne "\033]2;*** $* ***\007"

The requirement?:

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
>> Can you explain the "interactive" bit a bit more. Do you mean clicking 
>> on the window title and start typing away at it?
>>
>>     
> Exactly what I had in mine.
>   


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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Charles Wilson]

Lee D. Rothstein wrote:
> Andy Koppe wrote:
>> -- 
>> Chuck
>> 
> Nice example! Who is "Chuck"?

Me. As I explained to Andy off-list, the 'Virtual Identify' Thunderbird
plugin got kinda confused, and tried to pass off my email as if Andy had
sent it.  Bad Virtual Identity! No Cookie!

--
Chuck



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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Lee D. Rothstein]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> Andy Koppe wrote:
>   
>> Lee D. Rothstein wrote:
>>     
>>> I do lots of bash scripting including Windows/DOS commands, and I
>>> can think of only one character cell app that ever gave me any
>>> trouble from rxvt or xterm (whatever that app is -- I think a
>>> Kit app), I found a work-around and never needed it
>>> again.
>>>       
>> 'net' is a troublesome command that's been mentioned, although it seems
>> to be ok for basic stuff. But I guess there might be still be a few DOS
>> fullscreen apps around. Turbo Pascal perhaps? But yeah, I'd sooner
>> implement tabs than worry about DOS apps. ;)
>>     
>
> "full screen" or "DOS" is a red herring. Any program that does something
> like the following, if compiled as a native program, won't work in rxvt
> (or MinTTY, or cygwin/cmd-shell-with-CYGWIN=tty):
>
> #include <stdio.h>
> main() {
>   int c;
>   while ((c = getc(stdin)) != EOF) fputc(c, stdout);
> }
>
> The thing is, THIS program works as part of a pipeline even when
> compiled as a native program -- but it breaks if you try to use it
> interactively within rxvt/MinTTY/etc.  A cygwin-compiled version works
> in all cases.
>
> --
> Chuck
>
>
> --
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>
>
>   

Nice example! Who is "Chuck"?

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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Lee D. Rothstein]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> Lee D. Rothstein wrote:
>
>>  > "\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
>>  > "\e[1;5B": history-search-forward
>>
>> Perhaps I don't understand this 'bash' feature, but it doesn't
>> seem to work for me.
>
> Start typing a command, press Ctrl-Up, and it finds the previous line 
> in the history that started like that.
>
I'll work on that habit. Thanks.

>> I do lots of bash scripting including Windows/DOS commands, and I
>> can think of only one character cell app that ever gave me any
>> trouble from rxvt or xterm (whatever that app is -- I think a
>> Resource Kit app), I found a work-around and never needed it
>> again.
>
> 'net' is a troublesome command that's been mentioned, although it 
> seems to be ok for basic stuff. But I guess there might be still be a 
> few DOS fullscreen apps around. Turbo Pascal perhaps? But yeah, I'd 
> sooner implement tabs than worry about DOS apps. ;)
>
rudimentary 'net' works.


>>  > I didn't know xterm actually had a UI for this. Do people find
>>  > this useful?
>>
>> I've used it on occasion when I needed to scroll back through two
>> debugging runs of a text-mode (character cell) app (or debugging
>> statements).
>
> So your debug print macro or whatever would be switching screens?
>

No. Me at the terminal switches screens, using the options menu, before 
the second run.
 

>> What would be better for this and other problems, however, is a
>> feature that I would love: The ability to interactively, on the
>> fly change, the Title Bar/Task Bar Title to be clear on what each
>> Window is doing.
>
> Can you explain the "interactive" bit a bit more. Do you mean clicking 
> on the window title and start typing away at it?
>
Exactly what I had in mine.



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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Mark J. Reed]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 1:02 AM, Andrew DeFaria wrote:
> In my 25 years of working on such systems I can probably count on 2 fingers
> the number of times such a situation has arose and what I did was Control-C
> then Control-R again.

Sure.  I'm not disagreeing; I was more looking for a plausible
explanation than claiming necessity.

But if you're going to claim 25 years, you're going back to the first
version of ksh, which has some differences in history functionality
that might affect the percentages here. :)

-- 
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>

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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Andrew DeFaria]

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> True, but that's only one direction of history search, albeit the most 
> commonly useful one. For those cases where you're somewhere back in 
> your history and need to search forward, what do you do? 
In my 25 years of working on such systems I can probably count on 2 
fingers the number of times such a situation has arose and what I did 
was Control-C then Control-R again.
> The default binding for history-search-forward is control-S; 
> unfortunately, that's also usually the stop character and therefore 
> caught by the terminal before bash ever sees it. So you have to either 
> change the stop character or rebind the function, and if you rebind 
> that one you might as well bind the other one to something symmetric.
Again, if the need were more than 2 times in 25 years I'd probably just 
bind Control-E to it or something like that.
> Also, while it's fun to customize things in .inputrc (I have mine set 
> to editing-mode vi, in which incidentally the / key starts a history 
> search), I do recommend that everyone learn the emacs keys just 
> because that's what bash defaults to. Sure, if I'm going to be typing 
> more than a couple commands in a foreign bash setup, the first one I 
> type is "set -o vi". But for short sessions in someone else's 
> environment it's handy to be able to use the default bindings.
Hmmm... My usual inclination is to type "set -o emacs" when required! ;-)

Different strokes...
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
What do you do when you see an endangered animal that eats only 
endangered plants?


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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Mark J. Reed]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Andrew DeFaria wrote:
> Why not simply type Ctrl-R then the first few letters of a command (or some
> letters in the middle of a command). Works great! Requires no support from
> any terminal emulator...

True, but that's only one direction of history search, albeit the most
commonly useful one.  For those cases where you're somewhere back in
your history and need to search forward, what do you do?  The default
binding for history-search-forward is control-S; unfortunately, that's
also usually the stop character and therefore caught by the terminal
before bash ever sees it.  So you have to either change the stop
character or rebind the function, and if you rebind that one you might
as well bind the other one to something symmetric.

Also, while it's fun to customize things in .inputrc (I have mine set
to editing-mode vi, in which incidentally the / key starts a history
search), I do recommend that everyone learn the emacs keys just
because that's what bash defaults to.  Sure, if I'm going to be typing
more than a couple commands in a foreign bash setup, the first one I
type is "set -o vi".   But for short sessions in someone else's
environment it's handy to be able to use the default bindings.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>

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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Andrew DeFaria]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> Lee D. Rothstein wrote:
>
>>  > "\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
>>  > "\e[1;5B": history-search-forward
>>
>> Perhaps I don't understand this 'bash' feature, but it doesn't seem 
>> to work for me.
> Start typing a command, press Ctrl-Up, and it finds the previous line 
> in the history that started like that.
Why not simply type Ctrl-R then the first few letters of a command (or 
some letters in the middle of a command). Works great! Requires no 
support from any terminal emulator...
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
Old age is when you still have something on the ball but you are just 
too tired to bounce it.


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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Andy Koppe]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> Lee D. Rothstein wrote:
>> I do lots of bash scripting including Windows/DOS commands, and I
>> can think of only one character cell app that ever gave me any
>> trouble from rxvt or xterm (whatever that app is -- I think a
>> Resource Kit app), I found a work-around and never needed it
>> again.
> 
> 'net' is a troublesome command that's been mentioned, although it seems
> to be ok for basic stuff. But I guess there might be still be a few DOS
> fullscreen apps around. Turbo Pascal perhaps? But yeah, I'd sooner
> implement tabs than worry about DOS apps. ;)

"full screen" or "DOS" is a red herring. Any program that does something
like the following, if compiled as a native program, won't work in rxvt
(or MinTTY, or cygwin/cmd-shell-with-CYGWIN=tty):

#include <stdio.h>
main() {
  int c;
  while ((c = getc(stdin)) != EOF) fputc(c, stdout);
}

The thing is, THIS program works as part of a pipeline even when
compiled as a native program -- but it breaks if you try to use it
interactively within rxvt/MinTTY/etc.  A cygwin-compiled version works
in all cases.

--
Chuck


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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Andy Koppe]

Lee D. Rothstein wrote:

>  > "\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
>  > "\e[1;5B": history-search-forward
> 
> Perhaps I don't understand this 'bash' feature, but it doesn't
> seem to work for me.

Start typing a command, press Ctrl-Up, and it finds the previous line in 
the history that started like that.

> I do lots of bash scripting including Windows/DOS commands, and I
> can think of only one character cell app that ever gave me any
> trouble from rxvt or xterm (whatever that app is -- I think a
> Resource Kit app), I found a work-around and never needed it
> again.

'net' is a troublesome command that's been mentioned, although it seems 
to be ok for basic stuff. But I guess there might be still be a few DOS 
fullscreen apps around. Turbo Pascal perhaps? But yeah, I'd sooner 
implement tabs than worry about DOS apps. ;)

> Isn't ANSI implementation required of virtual terminals? I know
> that later DEC VTs, and HP terminals (bless their expensive
> little scroll-back buffer hearts) had an "ANSI" mode.

To be honest, I didn't really know what I was talking about there. 
Wouldn't surprise me though if MS had done their usual embrace&extend 
trick on the ANSI stuff.

>  > I didn't know xterm actually had a UI for this. Do people find
>  > this useful?
> 
> I've used it on occasion when I needed to scroll back through two
> debugging runs of a text-mode (character cell) app (or debugging
> statements).

So your debug print macro or whatever would be switching screens?

> What would be better for this and other problems, however, is a
> feature that I would love: The ability to interactively, on the
> fly change, the Title Bar/Task Bar Title to be clear on what each
> Window is doing.

Can you explain the "interactive" bit a bit more. Do you mean clicking 
on the window title and start typing away at it?

Andy

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Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.

[Lee D. Rothstein]

Andy Koppe wrote:

 > Lee D.Rothstein wrote:

 >> Hi, I've taken a first pass at distilling my experience with
 >> 'mintty' and the [ahem] discussion, here, about it into a text
 >> file (see attachment mintty.{h})

 > Thanks, that's a nice surprise!

Okay, since you at least didn't hate it, I'll plug it into a 'man'
template. I'll add additional stuff, as it becomes clear (such as
the '.inputrc' stuff, here).

 >> Speed

 > It's quite funny, I didn't realise that until people here
 > pointed it out, probably because I didn't have to do anything to
 > achieve it. :)

Actually, it's surprising that I could notice it, at all. My new
computer is a Gateway, running Vista 64b, and it's much (>>>>)
faster than the old one (less than a year old) that got zapped by
lightning static (an HP [slow disk!!!], running Vista 32b, Intel
Dual Core and 2/3 the RAM). Xterm was pretty much intolerably
slow with the HP, but is quite peppy on the GW (AMD Quad Core).

(The other nice things about Vista 64b are a practically
unlimited command line, and much longer tolerated path names,
ANAICT [as near as I can tell].)

Actually, the only thing wrong with MinTTY, ANAICT, is the name.
I would have preferred: CFFTTW (Cygwin's Fast F-ing Terminal That
Works! ;-) CFFT, for short? The name would be in the tradition,
for example, of MIT's node for documentation --
ftp://RTFM.mit.edu !)

 >>  > Best conformance to my personal expectation of what various
 >>    directional keys (<HOME>, <END>, <->>, <<->, etc.) should do!
 >>    (However, still bummed that <CTRL>-<->> & <CTRL>-<<-> do not
 >>    move, respectively forward and back a word on the command
 >>    line!)

 > These two lines in .inputrc should do the trick:

 > "\e[1;5D": backward-word
 > "\e[1;5C": forward-word

Thank you!

 > And here's my favourite bash feature, mapped to Ctrl-Up/Down:
 >
 > "\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
 > "\e[1;5B": history-search-forward

Perhaps I don't understand this 'bash' feature, but it doesn't
seem to work for me.

 >>   * Futures expectation: My number one goal would be for it to
 >>     replace the Cygwin console for everything, although I
 >>     understand there are great difficulties with that goal.

 > Hmm, yep, unfortunately the only path I can see towards that
 > goal is to take Console2's approach of capturing a Windows
 > console, and to try and make the cygwin terminal running inside
 > it more standards-compliant, but that would still leave the
 > slowness of the console and the lag caused by  capturing its
 > contents.

 > Perhaps it would be possible to override and reimplement
 > the Win32 console functions as listed at
 > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682073(VS.85).aspx ?
 > Do DOS software interrupts still work too? It would certainly
 > be a huge amount of work though, which would include having to
 > reimplement the console's ANSI emulation.

I do lots of bash scripting including Windows/DOS commands, and I
can think of only one character cell app that ever gave me any
trouble from rxvt or xterm (whatever that app is -- I think a
Resource Kit app), I found a work-around and never needed it
again.

Isn't ANSI implementation required of virtual terminals? I know
that later DEC VTs, and HP terminals (bless their expensive
little scroll-back buffer hearts) had an "ANSI" mode. Does Curses
make this issue go away?

 >> Because of the nature of various "discussion" elements in wading
 >> through this stuff, I am referring to my documentation "project" as:
 >> *Diuretics*!

 > *grin*

BTW, that's why the "signature" was: "L Dave Rothstein" (as in "L Ron
Hubbard" -- Dianetics! ;-)).

 >> @@ What "alternate screen"? @@

 > Good question. It's vt100 lingo for a second logical screen
 > that wholescreen apps such as editors normally use, often through
 > the (n)curses library. (I'm taking "wholescreen" to mean an app
 > controlling the whole terminal screen, as opposed to the terminal
 > window being in fullscreen mode.)

 >>     = Is there an alternate screen toggle in 'mintty' as there is
 >>       in 'xterm'?

 > I didn't know xterm actually had a UI for this. Do people find
 > this useful?

I've used it on occasion when I needed to scroll back through two
debugging runs of a text-mode (character cell) app (or debugging
statements).

What would be better for this and other problems, however, is a
feature that I would love: The ability to interactively, on the
fly change, the Title Bar/Task Bar Title to be clear on what each
Window is doing. (I already know how to change the title from the
command line, e.g.:

  echo -ne "\033]2;*** $* ***\007"

but that doesn't fill the need with an omnibus app/tool like
virtual terminal.)

The older I get the more I need this. I could actually use this
on every Windows app, and perhaps on real life objects and
conversations, as well! ;-)

 >>     = How do you invoke it?

 > You shouldn't need to really. Apps such as 'less' or 'vi'
 > switch to it using the releavant vt100 incantation.

Okay, I'll fix that.

 > > [about mousewheel scrolling in less]
 > > the feature doesn't work in Vista when the
 > > scrollbar is shown. Looks like the inactive scrollbar is
 > > swallowing the mousewheel events.

 > Actually this seems to be an issue with the trackpad driver on
 > my laptop. It's works fine with a bog-standard USB mouse on my
 > desktop.

Yeah, I forgot to fix that. It works fine on my box.

 > Thanks again,
 > Andy

You are definitely welcome.

Lee


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