multiple gettys, why use them?

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <637 at bacchus.UUCP> darren at bacchus.UUCP (Darren Friedlein) writes:
 [ua vs. multiple gettys]

> When I say the windows are slow, I mean they are sluggish in
>coming up, erasing and re-sizing.

But the full-screen windows don't have this problem. They don't have
borders and can't be resized. They also don't get a name from ua but you
can use windy for that.  Does the <suspend> key give you a list of active
windows when you use multiple gettys or is that a function of ua?

>Going to multiple gettys doesn't mean you stop using UA.  Using multiple
>gettys just gives you several logins.  You can run UA in every one if you
>want (as long as you don't use more than 16 windows).

But the only reason I can see for using multiple gettys would be to
avoid loading ua at all.  That is, you should get the same effect by
opening a borderless window and executing su (if you want to be another
user), unless I am still missing something.

>The main difference between a UAish window interface and a multiple-getty
>interface is that when you go from one window to another in UA, the
>parent window blocks untill the child window is killed.  With multiple-
>gettys (ies?) each window can take user input and run programs
>simultaneously.

Not true!  You can see this easily if you put multiple bordered windows
on the screen and start jobs that generate output in all of them. Output
continues even if the window is not exposed - input blocks (of course)
until you switch to that window.  Parent-child relationships have no
effect on anything except where you land when a window is closed (but
many of the ua-ish things wait on their children to exit).  Using
<suspend> or the [w] icon, you can make any window active by selecting
from the list, or you can use shift-suspend (resume) to jump to the
next (previous).  The only thing strange is that the window you are
leaving becomes unblocked even if you have pressed ctl-S to pause
output (sometimes a pain when you want to stop something and jump
to an alternate window for a while - when you come back, things may
have scrolled off the screen).
 
Les Mikesell