MGR - I have some suggestions - can we talk?

[Mark Horn]

In article <22800 at rcsac1.UUCP> rhaar at rcsac1.UUCP (Bob Haar CS50) writes:

[ ... ]

>are not techniacally part of UA, but I think about them as part of the
>UA environment. MGR sounds great - fast, powerful, cleaner, etc. - but
>I would really like to know what I might be giving up to get it.

Well, against recommendations I am running with UA intact.  Meaning that if I 
exit mgr, I can just type ua and ua comes up as usual.  And everything that
depended on ua will still work properly.  It does have some wierd side effects
though.  Since I run the phone manager, when ever I answer my phone and
I'm in mgr, the phone manager will write directly to the screen and screw up 
things royally.  Fortunatly they're easy to clean up (most of the time)  The
reason that I run the ua is simply because I have a voice power board set 
up as an answering machine, so I need wind.o loaded so that I can use ve to
listen to my messages.  If I could figure out how to keep the phone manager
and also have it not write to the screen, and have a voice editor that didn't 
depend on the things that Lenny described, I'd be pretty happy.  I also have 
about 100 phone numbers stored in the phone manager which I do NOT want to
have to transfer to a rolo-dex, etc.

>SMART does use special font sets that are now part of the system font library.
>It (at least the word processer part) doesn't do any fancy graphics. Since
>it is a commercial product, I don't have access source code or much info
>about how it works internally. I don't know how it handles windows or fonts.

I have MS Word and it works pretty well under mgr.  I can't use the mouse at
all the way I did under UA, but there seems to be a key sequance equivalant 
for each mouse click anyway, so I don't lose any functionality.

>AS for trying MGR, I thought it was still under test? Since the only connection
>between my unix-pc (grendl) and the rest of the world is the 1200 baud OBM, 
>I planned to wait until the unix-pc version of mgr became stable before
>downloading the 1+ MBytes of the mgr distribution package. 

I don't know what you define as stable, but I have yet to have any "real" 
problems with mgr.  (i.e. it hasn't crashed my machine nor destroyed data.)
Actually the only problems I've had with mgr haven't really bin the fault
of mgr.  Remember this has been used on Sun's for a while, so as a peice of 
software it's pretty stable.  Not quite integrated perfectly with the 3b1 yet, 
but it sure makes this machine alot more reasonable to program on.  Switching 
windows is a breeze!  BTW, wait until you compile mgr.  On my machine with a 
28ms HD and 1Meg of memory it took about 5 hours.  On another machine (which I 
use) which has the same HD but 2Meg of memory it took 1 hr 35 min.  Which brings
up another point.  On my machine (1 Meg mem) it can be pretty slow.  Not 
terrible, but significantly slower then on the 2Meg machine I use.

>	- Bob Haar

I guess I'm rambling here, but before I go I have to give kudos to Brad Bosch
for the port and to Brian Botton for the VIDPAL.  My machine is so much more 
fun now to actually program on instead of just have because it's unix that I
could afford.  So I'm all for anyone doing anything with mgr.  Speaking of 
which . . . is Lenny going to port sysinfo to mgr . . . ? . . . please?
Or maybe I should start this endeaver?

- sparkie
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