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Aucbvax.5917 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Fri Jan 22 15:35:30 1982 Unix vs VMS >From decvax!duke!bcw@Berkeley Fri Jan 22 15:31:11 1982 VMS won't trap ^Y if you set your terminal in PASSALL mode (roughly equivalent to "raw" mode on Unix). The major nice feature of the Unix terminal driver which doesn't have some counterpart in VMS is the ability to set the erase character and erase line characters. As I noted earlier, it would be nice if this capability were more general even in Unix:

change erase character symbol change erase line symbol change stop text symbol (currently ^S) change start text symbol (currently ^Q) change lexical quote symbol (currently \) change end-of-line symbol (currently <CR> or <LF>) change kill process symbol (currently RUBOUT)

The one which causes the largest amount of trouble is the quoting character since it's printable, but the others could be useful as well in some circumstances. The VMS terminal driver has a couple of other features which might be interesting to some of the people on the net, and which I miss somewhat in Unix:

^X - kill all typeahead which hasn't been read yet (sort of like kill line but more powerful) ^R - retype current line with editing functions complete - gives a clean copy of the line you're typing in after all of the editing operations have been done to it. Very handy on hardcopy devices or on CRT's which don't erase the old character when it's typed over (like Tektronix 40xx terminals). ^O - Throw away output until either a) next ^O entered b) end of program c) the program executes a reset control-O function The nearest approximation on Unix is the rubout but that kills the process. Sometimes it's useful to cancel the output without killing the process.

The ^R character is probably the one I find most useful.

Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University

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