Multi-process curses?

[Stephen J. Friedl]

OK guys.and.gals,

     We have a curses-based message-center application (like a
"while you were out" pad for telephone operators).  We would like
the operator to be able to put a caller (and his/her message) on
hold and take another call.  We *could* rewrite our application
to do this manually, but we would like to do something
(hopefully) a little more clever.

     We want to have a handful of these processes running at
once, talking to the terminal via Sys V SXTs.  Our first version
uses a shl-like program to swap back and forth between two
applications on ^Z -- it sends SIGUSR1 to say "you're up,
redraw".  This works but is kind of slow.  There must be A
Better Way.

     Generally speaking, we want curses to know about the other
sessions.  If we put curscr in shared memory (again, speaking
generally), and can "somehow" link the various windows structures
together, with a little mutex around the shared access, it seems
that this could be extended generally to a pretty slick little
windowing system where child curses processes would be largely
unaware that they were running in a multi-process environment.
Has anybody done this?  Are we out of our minds?

     Related to this, are there any good refs on Sys V SXTs?  We
have figured out quite a bit about them but questions remain.

     Thanks,
     Steve

-- 
Steve Friedl    V-Systems, Inc. (714) 545-6442    3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl at vsi.com    {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl   attmail!vsi!friedl