unencumbered terminal emulators

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010, Fairlight wrote:
>Simon--er, no...it was Brian K. White--said:
>> 
>> Actually, with mono to fill in for .net to make a port easier, and wine 
>> to make the whole idea of a real port unnecessary in the first place 
>> since it already does a pretty good job of emulatine the start magic and 
>> the registry and even the desktop integration, I really fail to see the 
>> complaint even more than I already did.
>
>You may have forgotten, but for -desktop- use, Bill's a Mac guy.  BSD
>underpinnings or not, I'm not sure WINE will work on anything but Linux,
>even in emulation/personality mode.  (And I surely would run a VM before
>I'd run under two levels of emulation in series...but when you go to that
>length, the guest should at least be an OS you like...and Bill hates
>Windows.)

Actually I hate spending money unnecessarily, here or at my client's sites.
My recent forays into getting decent Linux terminal functionallity with
FilePro is for clients who want a simple, inexpensive desktop that can do
e-mail, browsing, simple office functions, and run FilePro applications on
Linux servers.  We're running simple Atom based desktop machines.

CentOS with gnome desktop, FireFox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.org handles
the functions other than FilePro access.

The gnome-terminal program provides easier user selection of fonts and font
sizes that xterms, but there are still some issues with screen displays
that I have described in several previous threads on this list.  The most
obnoxious are the vertical alignment problems of borders and such which I
wrote about a few days ago when I commented on trying FilePro on an iPad
with iSSH.  Function key mappings, help labels and such are fixable via
termcap, but this problem appears to be that FilePro doesn't do proper
cursor positioning before writing columns, but depends on font spacing to
get things wrong.

FWIW, I ran into a similar problem with python ncurses programs where the
move and add string functions didn't properly position the cursor
vertically when painting screens, but required a separate function call to
position the cursor, then another to place the string.  It took me a while
to figure out why scripts that had been working for years suddenly broke.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792

Economic history is a never-ending series of episodes based on
falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money.
The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that
trend, and step off before it is discredited. -- George Soros