Bell Labs emacs

[Montgomery]

This is a response to jim Gottlieb's questions, which I could not
get through via mail.  Hit n unless you are really interested.

There is a newer version, but it won't help your problem that much.
My emacs can actually be compiled to use termcap, terminfo, or the
internal distribution system.  In the early days of the unix/pc, my
own was the only one I could count on being there, so that's the way
it is built for THE STORE.  As I look at the
description for the unix/pc console, the problem I see is that it
doesn't have capabilities for insert or delete line.  I don't know
if this is just my bad descriptor or something else.  If these are
present, it will do a reverse scroll by doing line inserts and
deletes, which is somewhat better looking that a complete redraw.  I
never bothered to use a full screen reverse scroll, because there
are few terminals that will do that but won't do insert/delete, and
insert/delete usually works out better in the long run because it
preserves the status lines on the bottom of the screen.

If you want to experiment with the terminal descriptions, run emacs
and edit the files in ~EMACS/terminals (~EMACS expands correctly
only inside of emacs).  The one for the console is probably
~EMACS/terminals/s4, but I'm not sure.  It's whatever your $TERM is
set to.  If you find documentation that suggests that you can
selectively add or delete lines, you can add those capabilities by
setting "al=" or "dl=" in the file.  Let me know if you get
something to work.
-- 

Warren Montgomery ihlpf!warren