[mkp@cs.utexas.edu (Martin Purvis): [dvorak: Emacs on Symbolics serial-terminal port]]

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Mon, 1 Aug 88  10:29:44 CDT
    From: MKP@genevieve.cs.utexas.edu (Martin Purvis)

    Has anyone connected an ANSI terminal to the serial port of a Symbolics
    and managed to do some sort of full-screen editing from the terminal?
    We have a local user who needs this functionality.  The function
    neti:enable-serial-terminal has a :x3.64 keyword argument, so the ANSI
    escape sequences are presumably recognized.

I have dialed up to the serial port of a Symbolics machine.  It defaults
to assuming a printing terminal.  You need to do
(NETI:ASK-TERMINAL-PARAMETERS), which will ask the user the screen size
of the terminal and whether it supports X3.64 control sequences.  The
process you are running in is a Lisp Listener, and the cursor control
facilities of the terminal are used by the Input Editor.  You can do
Zmacs-style editing on command lines and Lisp forms, and if a command
requests multi-line input (as :Send Message and :Send Mail do) you will
be able to move up and down in the input.  In Genera 7.2 they even made
the debugger c-M command smart about this -- if you do this from the
remote terminal stream it will offer to let you type the bug report in
right there; in prior releases it would put a Zwei window up on the
console and tell you that you have to go to the console to fill in the
bug report.

One problem I have noticed is that the ANSI software assumes that the
terminal recognizes the ESC <backquote> control sequence, which is not
recognized by any DEC terminals, nor by most emulators.  This sequence
is used for positioning the cursor to a different column on the same
screen line, and its lack is noticed most often during command name
completion.

                                                barmar