Re: nterm a vt100 emulator

[Ivan Kanis <expire-by-2009-10-21@kanis.fr>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA> wrote:

>> This a vt100 emulator for Emacs. It has a lot of rough edges. As it
>> stands it passes the first 3 tests of vttest. I have another project
>> coming up so I won't be able to work on nterm for a while.
>
> Could you expand a bit on it?  Mostly, how does it compare to term.el
> and terminal.el?

Hi Stefan,

I wrote it because I couldn't fix the cursor bug in term. term and
terminal are not meant to be full emulation. term has a pager and
line mode which nterm doesn't do. nterm doesn't track current directory
like term does. I can't comment on terminal, I haven't used it.

Nterm is meant to be a full vt100 compatible terminal emulator. It has
the following features:

- G0 G1 switching with SI and SO
- special graphics characters (used for line drawing)
- US and UK character set.
- blinking, bright, underline and reverse rendition
- scroll up and down including within top and bottom margin
- switch terminal background color
- switch between 80 and 132 columns screen
- tabulation set and reset
- all VT100 escape sequences are handled

Things that remains to do:
- Double width character
- Double height character
- Sanitize keyboard map
- ANSI color
- VT52 compatibility mode

I think nterm is easier to maintain than term. One look at term's
term-emulate-terminal function should convince anyone that term cannot be
maintained anymore. Compare with nterm equivalent function nterm-emulate
it is only 25 lines long.

It has a recording mode (C-c r) so that you can record and replay
traces. It has a terminal memory so that area of the terminal can be
redrawn for blinking and changing screen background. There is a memory
dump mode (C-c m) that allows the programmer to examine the memory.
-- 
Ivan
Kanis http://kanis.fr

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