FilePro from Linux xterm or other terminal?

[Brian K. White]

On 8/11/2010 11:09 PM, John Esak wrote:
> Bill,
> I just generally use a "." for the GZ character... It gives me a period...
> Which looks normal to me.  On SCO's ansi termcap it is accomplished like
> this:
>
> :GZ=\E[10m.
>
> If you put a , you'd get a comma, if a ~ you'd get a ~... If you put a k,
> you'd get a k  :-)
>
> On Windows, filePro doesn't use a termcap except in a very old version that
> I'm pretty certain no one would ever be using now. The built in environment
> variable is PFEOF and it takes the hex value of whatever you want.  No,
> wait, it takes the decimal value and converts it to the hex value and then
> displays that hex value converted.  So
>
> PFEOF=46
>
> Is really a 2e which is a period and makes things on Windows look like my
> Unix end of field markers.  I absolutely hate the giant triangles laying on
> their sides.  Whever thought that one up has zero aesthetic
> sensibilities.... :-)  Watch, I'll find out it was Ken now. .... :-)

I don't like to ever terminate or delimit a field using a character that 
may ever appear in the data unless you can do something like use a color 
combo that is guaranteed never to appear on a screen or input prompt for 
any other use but that. Like use a green period and never display any 
data in green anywhere. That might be kind of tricky to do. It's easy 
enough to embed the "turn this color" in the GZ field, but how do you 
restore the previous colors reliably? There are push & pop ansi codes to 
save & restore the current state, but you can't know that they aren't 
already being used when your GZ field will be output.

So, for me the field terminator always has to be something that is never 
in the data. A square, a circle, a triangle, anything but a comma or a 
period or any other normal character, no full-cell solid colors either 
since that just looks like part of the screen or looks like a 
non-blinking non-moving cursor. This is all only when it's unavoidable 
to actually display the GZ character. NORMALLY we construct screens such 
that the color changes right at or before the end of field and filepro 
automatically hides the GZ char in that case since the color-change 
serves as an even better marker. Or if that's not an option or not 
aesthetically desirable in some cases, we make the foreground and 
background colors the same right where the GZ char would display if 
necessary so that the GZ char is invisible. That just leaves input 
prompts as pretty much the only places that actually ever display the GZ.

Lastly, aside from being "something never found in the data" I also make 
it something symmetrical that looks equally correct at the beginning or 
at the end of a field, so a circle or square but not a left-triangle. 
This way I can embed \GZ at the end of input popup prompts, and filepro 
adds one at the end, so the final displayed result is a little neater 
and more obvious to a new user who otherwise wouldn't know what that 
funny square was over to the right there.

It's also hard to nail down _any_ character unless you know exactly what 
terminal emulator and what font(s) all your users are using.
If you allow people to use any old terminal emulator, you'll essentially 
never be able to guarantee what the fp screens look like to other users. 
It won't always look the same to them as it looks to you.
That will require upgrading fp to unicode.

-- 
bkw