Re: [MiNT] toswin2 vt100

[Guido.Flohr@t-online.de (Guido Flohr)]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 26, 2000 at 10:24:27AM +1200, Mario Becroft wrote:
> I appreciate your sentiments about terminals, but I must say that I have
> not had any real problems with TOSWIN2, even when using split-screen
> programs such as the ones that you mention.
> 
> I think it's just a matter of having the tw100 termcap entry installed,
> and using it, instead of pretending it is vt100.

That's exactly the point: Of course you have to install the correct
terminal descriptions (termcap _and_ terminfo) in order to get curses
applications to work.  This is absolutely normal and it is also a common
problem for other platforms.  If you use the KDE terminal emulator in
recent Linux distributions you have the same trouble because only few
non-Linux systems know about the "kvt" terminal emulation.

Brian complained about the lack of a decent and stable terminal for
MiNT.  Simple advice: Use tw52, not tw100.  The vt52 terminal is only a
poor subset of a vt100, but the Atari console has always been a lot more
powerful than a pure vt52 (and that's why it is not a vt52 but an st52
resp. tt52 terminal).  The tw100 emulation was only invented to allow
people to fake their terminal into vt100 when they log into other
systems.  However, tw100 doesn't have all of the capabilities of a vt100
terminal and some features are simply incompatible to vt100.

On the other hand, tw52 is a quite powerful terminal emulation of its own
right.  It can do everything that tw100 can do, but - from my experience -
it does it better.  If you have the chance, use tw52.

One of the most annoying caveats of tw100 is the broken support for an
alternative character set.  This alternative character set produces the
famous IBM rulers that generations of MS-DOS applications have build their
GUI on.  It is nowadays heavily exploited by various system administration
tools for Linux (e. g. SuSE-Yast or the Redhat installer).  With tw52
these graphical elements are approximated by ASCII characters (see my
nlogin graphical login for an example), with tw100 you normally see
nothing but garbage.

Christian Felsch has once stated that the alternative character support
works, but it requires installation of a special font.  IMHO this is the
wrong approach, Toswin2 should simply draw these characters with VDI
functions instead of using a font (this would make the rulers
automatically scalable).

One problem with tw52: The Atari terminal emulation is often referred to
as the "VT-52 emulation".  This has lead to the habit that many people log
into a foreign machine from their Atari console, set TERM=vt52 and wonder
why even elm refuses to work.  That's only natural: By setting TERM to
vt52 you tell the system that you have an almost dumb terminal (vt52 is
really dumb) and many programs cannot cope with a terminal that lacks so
many features.  But: The st52, at52 and tt52 terminal emulations are part
of the half-official termcap and terminfo databases for years, even tw52
is known on many systems.  The capabilities of these terminals are mostly
sufficient but you have to tell the system that you have such a
terminal.  My preferred order is therefore:

	tw52
	tt52
	st52
	at52
	tw100
	vt100
	vt52

Try them out until one of the works.  Only on very old systems you will
have to fall through down to vt52 (of course, before setting TERM to tw100
or vt100 you have to configure you Toswin window to actually use the tw100
emulation instead of tw52).

Anyway, I have used tw52 with advanced ncurses and slang applications like
mutt, lynx, nlogin, all Redhat newt tools for ages, and they all worked
perfectly.  So, Brian, before you complain again, install the terminfo and
termcap database from Sparemint, try out these applications with mutt,
lynx, etc. and compare the output with the output on your Solaris or HP-UX
terminal emulation.  Of course MiNT doesn't rule the computer world like
Linux and can force another superfluous terminal emulation into ncurses
every second day but the status quo is actually very usable and compared
to the terminal emulations offered by CDE, Toswin is actually brilliant.

Ciao

Guido