Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Updated: mintty 2.7.4

[Doug Henderson <djndnbvg@gmail.com>]

On 6 February 2017 at 12:46, Thomas Wolff wrote:
> Am 05.02.2017 um 21:36 schrieb Brian Inglis:
>>
>> On 2017-02-05 11:35, Thomas Wolff wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Achim,
>>>
>>> Am 04.02.2017 um 17:13 schrieb Achim Gratz:
>>>>
>>>> Thomas Wolff writes:
>>>>>
>>>>> I have uploaded mintty 2.7.4 with the following changes:

This may be a whisper from the distant past when some glass ttys moved
the cursor to the next line when you wrote to the last column of a
line, and others did not move the cursor until you wrote the next
character. Or they were different depend the width mode: 80 or 132
characters.

A virtual terminal handler, such as curses, had to know which behavior
would occur on the physical terminal in order to correctly maintain
the virtual terminal cursor position. When you did not know what the
physical terminal would do, you had to avoid writing to the 80th
column, or use safe cursor positioning that would work in either case.

Back in the day, I wrote a full screen editor that was usable with a
luggable glass tty with a 300 baud acoustic modem. Optimizing the data
stream was an extreme priority.

I also enhanced the terminal emulator that came with Plan 9 to more
fully emulate DEC's VT100 family of physical terminals when connected
to various remote mini's and mainframes running full screen apps.

When you don't know the precise behavior of a terminal or terminal
emulator, you must fallback to "safe" defaults. You can't always trust
the TERM variable. If you're lucky, you will get a standard
answer-back, which, in the case of a terminal emulator, may be
faithfully emulated.

Programs like screen and tmux throw themselves into the middle of this muddle.

HTH or at least entertained
Doug

-- 
Doug Henderson, Calgary, Alberta, Canada - from gmail.com

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