Again: A visual Unix shell, for character-based terminals.

[Gregory G. Woodbury]

heymann at cns.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jurgen Heymann) writes:
>I recently posted a question to the net ...
>> Is there a Norton Commander-like unix shell somewhere? .....
>
>The responses I got as well as the follow-ups in comp.unix.shell indicate
>that my question was not clear enough. It should be:
>
>   Is there a Norton-Commander like unix shell for character based
>   terminals, i.e. using the TERMINFO and curses?
>
>Of course there is great stuff for XWindows, as well as for the Unix
>versions running on the PC (386). But I'm thinking about general AT&T Unix
>here. Since the terminal control information is there (TERMINFO DB) why
>not use it?

A bit of history.

Under Edition 7 UNIX, Rand produced a little gem called the directory
editory that provided a nearly full-screen character terminal interface
for manipulating directories.  That is, one could change file names, the
permission bits and owner and group, and attach comments to each file.
A hard-coded cursor package limited it use severly.

A small, environment variable based, but still hard coded, cursor
package was added at Duke.  At the same time, file typing on the basis
of names and the magic numbers were added; also, the files were labeled
with single character codes and certain one and two key sequences were
captured to invoke compilers, editors and even make!  It became 'ded'
and was moderatly popular at Duke (well, maybe 5 users :-)  one very
dedicated to it! - me).

A few more years later and it showed up briefly at BTL in a couple of
projects and was adapted to more and more modern forms of curses.  Still
the basic features of annotation of file names, simple file typing and
simple keystroke interception hung on.

Around 1986, it was moved over to MS-DOS and was limited back to ANSI
only mode use, but a little more flexibility in keystroke mapping was
added (having function keys and ALT keys was fun).

It, now called the wolfe shell (wsh) lies languishing in a forgotten
direcrtory somewhere awaiting ressurection on hearing that someone,
somewhere, might like to have a somewhat visual interface to assist the
development process without the full environment support of FACE or 10+
or whatever.

What really remains to be done is a general purpose keystroke
interceptor that doesn't conflict too badly with most curses keystroke
identification.  I lack information about how many keyboards out there
provide support for the function keys and/or ALT keys.  I have some
solutions for PC-type keyboards, but am limited somewhat to ISC and/or
Opus Systems access.

I have thought of taking some of the currently available Bsh/Ksh
work-alikes and adding in altkey/function key support and an annoted
directory display mode.

Does this sound like something interesting?   Or has ever programmer
already done their own version of this?
-- 
Gregory G. Woodbury @ The Wolves Den UNIX, Durham NC
UUCP: ...dukcds!wolves!ggw   ...mcnc!wolves!ggw           [use the maps!]
Domain: ggw at cds.duke.edu     ggw%wolves at mcnc.mcnc.org
[The line eater is a boojum snark! ]           <standard disclaimers apply>