Tab settings

[George Robbins]

In article <1991May25.222326.4296 at fys.ruu.nl> mos at fys.ruu.nl (Henk Mos) writes:
> In <5659 at mhres.mh.nl> rvk at snoopy.mh.nl (Mark Reuvekamp) writes:
> 
> >We are running Ultrix 4.1 on a DECsystem 5000/100 and have trouble
> >with the terminal. Sometime the TAB settings get messed up. We don't
> >know what program causes this, it does seem to occur at random.
> 
> We have the same problems. Sometimes 'stty -tab' will work. I asked
> DEC about this problem and they suggested that it's caused by the
> the up/down arrow command recall of csh (which doesn't work very good
> anyway). Using tcsh should overcome this problem but I haven't noticed
> any improvements.

This all seems to symptomatic of DEC's botched attempt to implement all
three (BSD, System V and Posix) terminal control packages.  The result
is bits that only be set or visible in one mode that affect the other
modes.  Likewise calls to save / restore modes do not actually preserve
the entire state.

I'm not really optimistic that this will ever be fixed, DEC seems to
value the claims to System V and Posix compatibility more than making
the sytem work correctly for those who only need/desire the traditional
Berkeley semantics.

For an example, if you type "reset" or "stty sane" in Ultrix 3.1C, you,
will put your terminal in a mode that outputs a line feed after a crt
erase.  No combination of stty commands that I've found will change
back to the original crterase behavior.

Also, with respect to the command line editing feature, it appears that
executing certain programs which attempt to save/restore the terminal
modes result don't preserve the particular "how to echo escape sequences"
that /new/csh needs to implement comand line editing.

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,     uucp:   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing:   domain: grr at cbmvax.commodore.com
Commodore, Engineering Department     phone:  215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)