window size

Moderator, John Quarterman std-unix at ut-sally.UUCP
Sun Oct 26 13:08:53 AEST 1986


From: gwyn at brl.arpa (VLD/VMB)
Date:     Mon, 20 Oct 86 10:00:13 EDT

Many of us have long outgrown the fixed-size, constant-width font model
of text characters.  Such ideas as pagination to multiples of N text
lines are not as useful as they might once have been.  I would hope
that simplistic models of terminal text do not become more deeply
embedded in specifications such as POSIX.  Limitations due to
insufficiently general models are one of the worst problems with
existing systems; we can do better.

As to what TIOCGWINSZ should return: for some situations character
cell array dimensions are appropriate; for others pixel array size
is appropriate.  It would be best to supply both, with the explanation
that a "pixel" may just be a character cell for old-fashioned terminal
devices (in which case both sets of dimensions would have the same
numerical values).

Volume-Number: Volume 7, Number 80



More information about the Mod.std.unix mailing list