Re: multi-tty breakage on MS-Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:29:45 +0300
> From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> >   >   . "emacs -nw" crashes on startup; backtrace attached below.
> > 
> > This is a known problem, Jason Rumney stated that this does not work
> > in his message announcing that multi-tty was ported to Windows. 
> > Can you please help fixing it? 
> 
> I will, if I find enough time.

I fixed a few problems, and now "emacs -nw" starts on Windows.  Please
test.

Some problems that are still to be fixed, before "emacs -nw" can be
considered operable on Windows:

  o Colors don't work.  Details:

     . Emacs knows it has 16 colors, but draws only white on black and
       reverse video.  (Try "M-x list-colors-display".)

     . Mode line and menu bar are not in reverse video, as they should
       be.

     . Under a debugger, each face returns the value 7 (white on
       black) as character attribute from w32_face_attributes.

  o Ctrl-C keystrokes are swallowed and don't get to Emacs input
    queue.  For example, "C-x C-c" will not kill Emacs.

  o The screen buffer dimensions are not restored by Emacs when it
    exits.  You will see that the scroll bar of the DOS box is not
    restored, for example.  (Use the Properties of the DOS box to
    restore manually.)

After these problems are solved, I think we need to decide whether it
makes sense to use several tty's on Windows.  I know that one use case
for the multi-tty Emacs on Posix platforms is to connect to the same
Emacs session remotely; I think this use case doesn't make much sense
on MS-Windows (but if I'm wrong, please correct me).  Are there other
use cases? if so, what are they?

If we find legitimate use cases for multi-tty on MS-Windows, more
coding will be needed to provide the Windows equivalents of opening
a non-default tty device, emulate suspension, etc.