8 Aug
2018
8 Aug
'18
7:51 p.m.
[...] totally overwhelms any aesthetic considerations
of disliking
prompts taking up a line (or insisting on a clear line before it -- I
don’t understand why you would suggest such a straw man, which is not
what I was advocating).
I totally understand what you're saying, but I hardly ever copy and
paste between terminals so it's just not an issue to me and then
my preference for a compact prompt and little whitespace prevails.
I'll give you that the clear line thing is personal and won't
necessarily apply to others. The "you'll want to" was misplaced.
At least the 300 baud modem gave you time to ponder
over those few lines
before they scrolled off the screen. In that scenario, lines of text
were precious, although the HP terminals charge by characters, not
lines. But I don’t think anybody in their right mind uses terminals like
that any more.
They charged per character? That's fascinating.
I'm too young to have worked with teletypes or terminals but to
experience what working over a slower connection would be like I wrote
a small pty program that throttles stdin and stdout to a given baud
rate:
https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle
It's probably nothing like the real thing but I found it interesting to
experience adapting to a slow terminal and to see things like pagers
update the screen step by step.