RE: [MiNT] terminal weirdness

[Steven Moore <smooreg@essex.ac.uk>]

On Sun, 29 Aug 1999, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:

>> Actually, I think I've found the reason for that. Its vt100 emulation
>> isn't as good as it ought to be. 
> But then _why_ does the tw100 emulation in version 2.2 work well,
> while the vt100 in 2.4 fails miserably?  Shouldn't software see
> improvement, instead of degeneration?

The termcaps and terminfos would work perfectly, if the emulation was
perfect, just like a real DEC VT100 terminal.

Of course, it isn't - in fact, a perfect VT100 emulation is, as I have
learned, really not an easy task... in fact, not possible for vconsd.
(132-column mode? Not gonna happen... can't see how I can arbritarily
change mode. Maybe I could make the font smaller, but <shrug> that
functionality will have to wait a long time.)

A compromise needs to be reached, really. One should be able to get away
with standard termcaps. Sadly, Toswin II falls just short of this.

>> It needs (at least!) support for the return-sends-crlf mode as 
>> this affects display AND keymapping. I think the vt100 termcap 
>> uses that mode...
> I have a fairly recent GNU termcap/terminfo.

Yes, and unfortunately (correctly, though) the GNU termcaps and
terminfos expect the terminal to be as advertised. They'd work
beautifully with a real vt100 terminal, the flaw is in Toswin's
emulation.

Fortunately it's actually a fairly small flaw; a vital unsupported
feature, in context, but not a really big one. While developing vconsd's
vt102 emulation, I may be able to patch Toswin to have such
functionality as well. I'll send diffs if this happens...

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