Re: Internal viewer troubles.

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hi, Miven!

> Poking around further and more systematically, it has nothing to do with
> mc, it has something to do with gnome-terminal, but I only ever see it
> with mc.

That's because mc is much more "aggressive" by default than other
programs.  Symbols with codes between 128 and 159 are known to be
problematic on many terminals, including Linux console.

The whole promise of an "8-bit clean" terminal is problematic, because
even in the best case (i.e. not xterm) an exception is made for code 155
(escape + 128).  There were more exceptions for xterm.  You demonstrated
that those exceptions were insufficient for gnome-terminal.

So what I did was the exclusion of the whole region between 128 and 159
for xterm-like terminals rather than improving the table of problematic
codes.  I think that's the only safe solution, because the region is used
for control characters, and there is no document I'm aware of, that would
say which characters in that region are guaranteed to be passed unchanged
from the application to the screen.

I don't think that we can talk about a bug in gnome-terminal unless you
find such document and show that gnome-terminal doesn't comply with it.

> I've had the problem for some time but I thought it was me not knowing
> what I'm doing, and of course it was.

And of course it wasn't.  The table xterm_printable was a gross hack, and
I'm glad that it's gone.  Wrong default is a problem with the software,
not with the user.  Lack of flexibility (e.g. abitility to set 8-bit clean
on Linux console, ISO 8859-1 on xterm) is also a problem with the
software.

> How is it that gnome-terminal gets the bitmap behind the characters?  I
> should talk to the guys over there.  They might know... There's a
> problem with the copy/paste menu too (it doesn't work, and seems like a
> good place to put xclipboard, a nifty little program, which does work.
> And then we can mock people who say the clipboard doesn't work
> properly.)

It's your business of course, but in my opinion you tend to do a rather
shallow analysis of the facts and tend to jump to the conclusions.  Just
try to count how many wrong assumptions you made when you wrote that you
are going to try --with-termcap option - one of them is the assumption
that a 500k (!!!) long shell script cannot handle this question without
you telling it what to do.

I don't know the developers of gnome-terminal, but you risk to be
ridiculed in the best case if you don't do a real analysis.  If you are
going to mock someone, you can be blacklisted.  That applies to this list 
as well, by the way.

> ps One more from my infinite barrel of questions:
> Is there any way of putting the selected text in the editor into the 
> selection buffer of the terminal, for use by xclipboard?

This was asked in the list already, and it was answered too.  The answer 
is negative.  X Window System is only used to read key modifiers.  Time to 
update FAQ.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin