Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!esosun!seismo!uunet!auspex!guy From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: how do I tell the size of a pseudoterm window? Message-ID: <577@auspex.UUCP> Date: 4 Dec 88 08:38:02 GMT References: <2081@vedge.UUCP> <6766@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <564@auspex.UUCP> <9047@smoke.BRL.MIL> Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara Lines: 43 >I don't know what AT&T's future windowing plans are; they've announced >(with Sun) a commitment to the "Open Look" but then everybody and his >brother is pushing some window interface right now. Too bad if X11 >pushes out the in-many-ways-superior layers approach. Too bad, then, I guess, because as far as I know AT&T plans to go with X11 or X11/NeWS; they're doing the Xt-based implementation of the Open Look interface. What do you mean by "the ... layers approach"? 1) The notion of a windowing terminal? People are already building terminals with X11 in them, so if you don't like the idea of having the computer on which you run your programs also painting bits on the screen, X11 doesn't force you to accept that idea. (I presume you can, under layers, somehow arrange to run a program on a machine other than the one to which your layers terminal is connected and have it interact with layers just as if it were running on that machine; if not, X11 does a *better* job than layers does in that instance.) 2) The ability to run some of your window system in the terminal, including downloaded user-interface code? You can do that with NeWS, assuming you're willing to write the downloaded code in PostScript (or have some translator that will generate PostScript for you - is there a tool that will do that for you?). You could also arrange to do something like that on at least some boxes that run X11, probably, via the extensions mechanism, assuming you had some way of downloading code to implement the extension. 3) Some aspect of the user interface of the window system provided by layers? X11 doesn't dictate much of the user interface; you might well be able to implement the layers user interface atop X11. >Layers aren't just pseudo-terminals, they're much more powerful. Oh, really? Can I use layers to implement, say, 4.xBSD's "script"? I'm not sure layers and pseudo-ttys are the same sort of beast, so I'm not sure you can say that one is "more powerful" than the other.