the never-ending pager discussion -- get a decent terminal

[avi at pegasus.UUCP]

I am getting tired of this discussion. Many reasonable terminals already
have the ability to buffer your output. My concept-108 is available with 8
pages of memory and my HP has options for ten pages. When something floats
past  your screen "window", a few flicks of function keys will get things back
into view. Or, you can use other terminals that have huge screens -- such as
my BLIT with 72 lines by 87 characters. Why should you depend on your
software to buffer every "small" stream of output.

An alternative solution is to log an entire session. Just for the fun of it,
I used to run my HP-2625 (a personal computer) in a mode that recorded my
entire session on a floppy disk. This allowed me to back up indefinitely. It
did get annoying when the output paused while yet another page was written
to the floppy. Yet another method (for non-interactive programs) is to do
things from within the shell macro in Goslings emacs. You then have an
absolutely powerful pager (the editor) constantly available in a multiple
window environment. This offers you tremendous advantages over "more" and
related programs. You may want to modify the MacLisp code so that it keeps
more than the last 10000 characters in the buffer.

In the BLIT layers environment, I download terminal emulators (for things
like hp and tektronix). Some of these emulators provide paging within the
terminal under the control of a mouse driven pop-up menu. Some of the
emulators will pause after a screenful (no matter what the size/shape of the
current window!) and flip the screen into reverse video -- until you hit any
key. Obviously, this is not an average terminal.

The moral of this article is: Don't put everything in the kernel! There are
many other ways that work reasonably well. Many of them don't even involve
any additional CPU cycles on the host.

-- 
-=> Avi E. Gross @ AT&T Information Systems Laboratories (201) 576-6241
 suggested paths: [ihnp4, allegra, cbosg, utcsstat, hogpc, ...]!pegasus!avi