unencumbered terminal emulators

[Fairlight]

Only Bill Campbell would say something like:
> 
> 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.

Okay, wait a second...you're using a fixed-width font, I presume, right?
Are you saying it's actually 'losing" the transmission of some spaces at
random intervals, thus fudging the spacing?

Does it ever lose anything -other- than spaces?  Because if you're using a
fixed-width font (and you're -more- than intelligent enough to know to do
that, so consider it an "is the power switch on?" verification), then it's
sounding like something I haven't seen in -years-, and that would be a flow
control issue.

> 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.

If both filePro -and- ncurses exhibit this behaviour, that points to
gnome-terminal being the culprit, not fP. fP doesn't use curses or
ncurses--it uses some private thing like 'libmoon", I though.  If two
different libraries are failing in the same way, the common fault point
would appear to be the thing they fail within.

Sounds like it might be time to use a different xterm.  :/

Humour me once, though...  What happens if you run screen(1) inside
gnome-terminal and use a straight vt100 termcap?  Does it still screw up
the spacing then?  I know screen has flow control settings...  ^Af is the
binding to cycle them.  If it's really flow control, this may be
salvageable via properties of gnome-terminal somehow.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.