Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tektronix!tekcrl!!eirik From: eirik@tekcrl.TEK.COM (Eirik Fuller) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Input Line Editing Summary: If ile knows too much, it's a shell Message-ID: <2834@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM> Date: 15 Jul 88 14:42:36 GMT References: <16456@brl-adm.ARPA> <9666@eddie.MIT.EDU> <10443@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <9671@eddie.MIT.EDU> <23839@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <6192@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <9677@eddie.MIT.EDU> Sender: ftp@tekcrl.CRL.TEK.COM Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR. Lines: 32 In article <9677@eddie.MIT.EDU> nessus@wonko.MIT.EDU (Doug Alan) writes: >> From: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) >> ... > >Well, that doesn't mean that "ile" is in the wrong place. "Ile" is in >the right place. What it means is that "ile" should be made smarter >for your use. It should keep track of what programs you fire up and >allow you to keep a seperate history buffer for each program. (If >this can't be done efficiently because of the kernal doesn't support >this well, then the kernal should be made to support it.) Ok, your line editor is going to know all about execing programs. Swell. In what sense won't it be a shell? It's starting to sound to me like you're really saying that shells that only let you edit their own command history and not the input to the programs they exec don't have full fledged input editing capabilities. I realize that there are wrinkles to be ironed out in building a shell that lets you edit input to the programs it execs. The worst of these wrinkles are not improved by separating the editor from the shell. I presume the best way to build a layer between the shell-editor and its child processes is for it to use a pty for each of them. Gee, this fictional shell-editor is beginning to sound more and more like a window manager. Why not just build an editor into xterm? A knowledgable user would guess which commands need which types of windows; pipelines, background jobs, and generally anything that doesn't need tty input could go into write only windows; editors and such could go into raw-mode windows, and things like debuggers and ftp could go into editor windows. Not that you need workstation graphics to make a shell-editor useful ...