Aucbvax.5917
fa.info-vax
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax
Fri Jan 22 15:35:30 1982
Unix vs VMS
>From decvax!duke!bcw@Berkeley Fri Jan 22 15:31:11 1982
VMS won't trap ^Y if you set your terminal in PASSALL mode (roughly
equivalent to "raw" mode on Unix).  The major nice feature of the
Unix terminal driver which doesn't have some counterpart in VMS
is the ability to set the erase character and erase line characters.
As I noted earlier, it would be nice if this capability were more
general even in Unix:

	change erase character symbol
	change erase line symbol
	change stop text symbol (currently ^S)
	change start text symbol (currently ^Q)
	change lexical quote symbol (currently \)
	change end-of-line symbol (currently <CR> or <LF>)
	change kill process symbol (currently RUBOUT)

The one which causes the largest amount of trouble is the quoting
character since it's printable, but the others could be useful as
well in some circumstances.  The VMS terminal driver has a couple
of other features which might be interesting to some of the people
on the net, and which I miss somewhat in Unix:

	^X - kill all typeahead which hasn't been read yet
		(sort of like kill line but more powerful)
	^R - retype current line with editing functions complete
		- gives a clean copy of the line you're typing in
		after all of the editing operations have been
		done to it.  Very handy on hardcopy devices or
		on CRT's which don't erase the old character when
		it's typed over (like Tektronix 40xx terminals).
	^O - Throw away output until either
		a) next ^O entered
		b) end of program
		c) the program executes a reset control-O function
		The nearest approximation on Unix is the rubout
		but that kills the process.  Sometimes it's useful
		to cancel the output without killing the process.

The ^R character is probably the one I find most useful.

			Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University

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