From max@linuz.sns.it Thu Oct 24 20:06:12 2002
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 12:54:37 +0200 (CEST)
From: Massimiliano Ghilardi <max@linuz.sns.it>
To: Adam Olsen <rhamph@d2dc.net>
Cc: twin-develop@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: thoughts and comments on twin

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Adam Olsen wrote:

>A few minutes ago I tried twin, first the debian version, then the
>0.4.4 tarball.  It's very cool, but I came up with these
>thougts/ideas/comments:
>
>* shift-pageup for scrolling
>* mousewheel for scrolling

This comes up often, so I will probably put it in a FAQ:
When displaying on X (either -hw=X or -hw=gfx) it is actually possible
to receive shift-pageup keys and to react to them, but all other display
drivers (Linux console driver for first) are unable to distinguish shift-pageup
from plain pageup, since it uses ascii-keyboard mode like almost all tty
programs, not raw-keyboard mode like X or svgalib.

I do not want to use raw-keyboard mode to avoid problems like unusable keyboard
after a crash and having to implement support for all the national keyboard
layouts like X does.
(in other words: you can tell Linux kernel which keyboard you have -- with
'loadkeys' and a bunch of files describing every possible national keyboard
layout -- X can do the same even if in a different method -- I do not want to
have to redo all that stuff for twin)


>* bold fonts

Yes, this could be an option for X drivers.

>* hide mouse cursor when typing

I did not think mouse could disturb, expecially since mouse redrawing on
-hw=tty is extremely smart and smooth even during heavy scrolling, but yes,
this could be an option too.

>* backspace in mutt produces beep, not scroll up
>* delete in mutt scrolls up, not down

This is strange, since twin tries really hard to emulate a Linux terminal
EXACTLY. Could you try hitting "ctrl-v" then "backspace" at bash prompt
and see what ASCII sequence you get? It should be ^?
Same with "ctrl-v" then "delete", should be ^[[3~
If this happens when twin displays on X, be aware that most X servers mess up
backspace and delete if you have numlock led turned on.


>* move window with super-mouse1-move and resize with super-mouse2-move
>  different way of having the menu.  using the right button is rather
>  non-intuitive

I did not get this, what are super-mouse1-move and super-mouse2-move?
You can move a window by dragging its title, and resize it by dragging its
lower-right corner (or from the menu, of course).
The effect of ANY mouse action can be configured in your ~/.twinrc

>* -hw=gfx appears to be attempting to load a 6x13 font, which doesn't
>  exist.  how do I get it to use a properly sized font?

There are two (IMHO) nice X11 fonts distributed with twin sources,
in the fonts/ subdirectory. One is "vga" and is 8x16, the other
is an unicode font and is 9x19.
And for -hw=gfx, you should specify something like
-hw=gfx,theme=ShinyMetal,font=vga
of course theme and font are optional, but you'd better play with them a little
to understand how they work: a theme works only if a font with corresponding
size can be loaded...

>* --hw is much more friendly to my poor brain than -hw

That's true, I did not follow GNU guidelines for program arguments.
I will change them so that both single hyphens (-hw) and double hyphens (--hw)
are accepted.

>* twin 0.4.4's tty mode garbles the display in xterm.  debian's 0.4.0
>didn't (but didn't support the mouse either)

That's a known problem, but, as I answered to whom pointed it out before,
I do not consider xterm support mandatory, since if you can display on xterm
you can also display on X (with a few exceptions due to firewalls/masqueraders/...).

>I have alot of other thoughts on where to take twin (I've wanted
>something like it for years), but I'll save those for later, after
>I've got -hw=gfx working. :)

Good luck and keep sending ideas and comments :-)

>--
>Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus
>Have internet, will learn.
>


                        Massimiliano Ghilardi

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| I have yet to meet a person who had a bad experience of Linux. |
| Most have never had an experience.                             |
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