[vox-tech] 'screen' size?

[William Kendrick]

[ regarding my problem running "tin" on my ISP's shell, while SSH'd in
  from my Zaurus, I asked folks in my LUG whether 'screen' had a way of
  providing a larger virtual screen than the terminal size, and then
  allowing me to scroll/pan around ]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 08:27:45AM -0800, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
>  
> you might be able to fool tin by setting COLUMNS and LINES, but you'd
> need a way to scroll.   surely the zaurius has some concept of a virtual
> screen?

Currently, no.  The two ways to resolve this include:

  1. Rotating the terminal 90 degrees.  (I can't do this, but I think
     it's a feature coming soon.)  Of course, this raises the issue of
     how to type on the hardware keyboard w/o turning your head sideways :)

  2. Making the terminal provide an "80 column emulation" mode, which,
     when enabled, provides a horizontal scrollbar.

     [ Sharp and QPE folks!  Do you think this is feasible? ]



One suggestion one of the developers (someone like me, not someone from
Sharp/Trolltech) came up with was to alter the tools (for example, rewrite
"ps" to make it display less text, or reformat it to fit better).

Two problems with this solution:

  1. That doesn't help me when I'm ssh'd somewhere and running "ps" on the
     remote machine :)

  2. Don't fool with standard tools!!! :)  If you alter the output of "ps",
     unless you also make it smart enough to tell if it's outputting to
     a terminal or a pipe, you risk messing up shell scripts that
     depend on it.


I'm sad to hear screen has no panning ability, but I suppose noone
really ever had a reason to think of it. :)

At least "less" allows you to scroll with [ and ] keys. :)
Too bad you can't pipe ncurses apps like "tin" through "less" ;) ;)

-bill!