Message-ID: <496B7C25.3090705@veritech.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:21:41 -0500
From: "Lee D. Rothstein" <l1ee057 AT veritech DOT com>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: First Pass at mintty documentation; etc.
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Andy Koppe wrote:

 > Lee D.Rothstein wrote:

 >> Hi, I've taken a first pass at distilling my experience with
 >> 'mintty' and the [ahem] discussion, here, about it into a text
 >> file (see attachment mintty.{h})

 > Thanks, that's a nice surprise!

Okay, since you at least didn't hate it, I'll plug it into a 'man'
template. I'll add additional stuff, as it becomes clear (such as
the '.inputrc' stuff, here).

 >> Speed

 > It's quite funny, I didn't realise that until people here
 > pointed it out, probably because I didn't have to do anything to
 > achieve it. :)

Actually, it's surprising that I could notice it, at all. My new
computer is a Gateway, running Vista 64b, and it's much (>>>>)
faster than the old one (less than a year old) that got zapped by
lightning static (an HP [slow disk!!!], running Vista 32b, Intel
Dual Core and 2/3 the RAM). Xterm was pretty much intolerably
slow with the HP, but is quite peppy on the GW (AMD Quad Core).

(The other nice things about Vista 64b are a practically
unlimited command line, and much longer tolerated path names,
ANAICT [as near as I can tell].)

Actually, the only thing wrong with MinTTY, ANAICT, is the name.
I would have preferred: CFFTTW (Cygwin's Fast F-ing Terminal That
Works! ;-) CFFT, for short? The name would be in the tradition,
for example, of MIT's node for documentation --
ftp://RTFM.mit.edu !)

 >>  > Best conformance to my personal expectation of what various
 >>    directional keys (<HOME>, <END>, <->>, <<->, etc.) should do!
 >>    (However, still bummed that <CTRL>-<->> & <CTRL>-<<-> do not
 >>    move, respectively forward and back a word on the command
 >>    line!)

 > These two lines in .inputrc should do the trick:

 > "\e[1;5D": backward-word
 > "\e[1;5C": forward-word

Thank you!

 > And here's my favourite bash feature, mapped to Ctrl-Up/Down:
 >
 > "\e[1;5A": history-search-backward
 > "\e[1;5B": history-search-forward

Perhaps I don't understand this 'bash' feature, but it doesn't
seem to work for me.

 >>   * Futures expectation: My number one goal would be for it to
 >>     replace the Cygwin console for everything, although I
 >>     understand there are great difficulties with that goal.

 > Hmm, yep, unfortunately the only path I can see towards that
 > goal is to take Console2's approach of capturing a Windows
 > console, and to try and make the cygwin terminal running inside
 > it more standards-compliant, but that would still leave the
 > slowness of the console and the lag caused by  capturing its
 > contents.

 > Perhaps it would be possible to override and reimplement
 > the Win32 console functions as listed at
 > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682073(VS.85).aspx ?
 > Do DOS software interrupts still work too? It would certainly
 > be a huge amount of work though, which would include having to
 > reimplement the console's ANSI emulation.

I do lots of bash scripting including Windows/DOS commands, and I
can think of only one character cell app that ever gave me any
trouble from rxvt or xterm (whatever that app is -- I think a
Resource Kit app), I found a work-around and never needed it
again.

Isn't ANSI implementation required of virtual terminals? I know
that later DEC VTs, and HP terminals (bless their expensive
little scroll-back buffer hearts) had an "ANSI" mode. Does Curses
make this issue go away?

 >> Because of the nature of various "discussion" elements in wading
 >> through this stuff, I am referring to my documentation "project" as:
 >> *Diuretics*!

 > *grin*

BTW, that's why the "signature" was: "L Dave Rothstein" (as in "L Ron
Hubbard" -- Dianetics! ;-)).

 >> @@ What "alternate screen"? @@

 > Good question. It's vt100 lingo for a second logical screen
 > that wholescreen apps such as editors normally use, often through
 > the (n)curses library. (I'm taking "wholescreen" to mean an app
 > controlling the whole terminal screen, as opposed to the terminal
 > window being in fullscreen mode.)

 >>     = Is there an alternate screen toggle in 'mintty' as there is
 >>       in 'xterm'?

 > I didn't know xterm actually had a UI for this. Do people find
 > this useful?

I've used it on occasion when I needed to scroll back through two
debugging runs of a text-mode (character cell) app (or debugging
statements).

What would be better for this and other problems, however, is a
feature that I would love: The ability to interactively, on the
fly change, the Title Bar/Task Bar Title to be clear on what each
Window is doing. (I already know how to change the title from the
command line, e.g.:

  echo -ne "\033]2;*** $* ***\007"

but that doesn't fill the need with an omnibus app/tool like
virtual terminal.)

The older I get the more I need this. I could actually use this
on every Windows app, and perhaps on real life objects and
conversations, as well! ;-)

 >>     = How do you invoke it?

 > You shouldn't need to really. Apps such as 'less' or 'vi'
 > switch to it using the releavant vt100 incantation.

Okay, I'll fix that.

 > > [about mousewheel scrolling in less]
 > > the feature doesn't work in Vista when the
 > > scrollbar is shown. Looks like the inactive scrollbar is
 > > swallowing the mousewheel events.

 > Actually this seems to be an issue with the trackpad driver on
 > my laptop. It's works fine with a bog-standard USB mouse on my
 > desktop.

Yeah, I forgot to fix that. It works fine on my box.

 > Thanks again,
 > Andy

You are definitely welcome.

Lee


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