From: thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com (jt -- John Thompson)
Subject: re: Need Some Advice..
Organization: Electrotechnical Laboratory, Tsukuba Science City
Distribution: fj
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 21:15:25 GMT
Return-Path: <apollo-list-errors@srvr1.engin.umich.edu>



> Not to start a religious war or anything but, as a user of both windowing 
> systems, I'm interested in knowing what people see in Domain pads, editor,
> etc.  Sure the ability to search back through the pads was nice, but the 
> functionality exists with Xterms -  just not as gracefully.

> Other than that though there is little I miss.  I found the window manager
> really painful for reasons too numerous to mention, but most had to do
> with how little I was able to customize it.  There seemed to be too few
> ways to do neat things that X, MWM, et al can do using resources, xset, etc.

> Maybe I just didn't pick up the DM tricks along the way; if so I blame it
> partly on the lack of documentation compared to O'Reilly and all the other
> authors at various levels on X.

> So what sorts of thing could DM do that X can't?

Whew!  Well, I'll try not to start the Jihad, but inflamatory remarks against
something as sacred as the DM tend to start wars.    :-)

OK -- what do I like in PADs:
1) very easy search/copy facilities in the transcript pad.  It's just a read-
   only file, after all, and you have all the search functions there.
2) almost infinite scrollback.  Yes, you can do this in X, but you have to say
   BEFOREHAND how much you want saved, and you pay for it up front.  All pads 
   have 262000+lines, and you only pay for what you use.  (We have blown past
   the limit, and the DM isn't too clean in handling that error)  :-(
3) infinite undo in the input pad.  Admittedly, you could blow that away with
   too large a paste into the input area (but at sr10, it told you!)
4) cooked input.  The ability to HOLD the input, and put in hundreds of lines
   of input text, then edit it, delete out some cruft that wasn't wanted, and
   then release the HOLD action.
   
What do I like in the EDITOR:
1) It's always there.
2) Rectangular cut&paste
3) Infinite undo
4) Non wraparound lines

What else do I like in the DM:
1) Key definitions.  Yes, you can do this in X, but it's not intuitive for me,
   at any rate.
2) Easy KEYBOARD-driven interface.  I don't HAVE to use the mouse if I don't
   want to.
3) The inherited environment/working-dir of new pads from the last one I was in.
4) The "slop" allowed in most window move/grow ops.  I can grab anywhere in
   the window that's "close" to the corner, and it figures out which corner I
   probably meant to stretch.
5) The wildcard handler.  This is a set of calls available to any (Apollo)
   program, not just the shell and editor.  (Bad news -- it wasn't released to
   you&me).
   
-- jt --
John Thompson
Senior Engineer / Sys-Admin
Honeywell, SSEC
Plymouth, MN  55441
thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
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