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Annotation of 43BSD/contrib/X/xterm/README, revision 1.1

1.1     ! root        1: Xterm is in a reasonably usable state.  We are sick and tired of working
        !             2: on it, but there are clearly major areas of improvement possible.  Do
        !             3: not look to us to do more than integration work on other people's
        !             4: improvement.  About 50% of it is the oldest existing code in the package
        !             5: and needing major rewrite.  Our thanks to Bob McNamara for the 50% which
        !             6: is solid.  If you feel motivated to work on xterm, the following are
        !             7: areas which need improvement.
        !             8: 
        !             9:        1) The backing store is done incorrectly; the attributes of the
        !            10: characters should be stored in a seperate array from the characters themselves.
        !            11: Much more work than necessary is going into converting to and from short
        !            12: representation.  This limits Xterm's performance, and 30% higher is easily
        !            13: within reach.  Unfortunately, this is about a 35% rewrite to do.  Remember that
        !            14: if your display is slow, you won't see very much performance gains, but
        !            15: on VaxStation II/GPX's and Sun 3's it would help considerably.
        !            16: 
        !            17:        2) some people like title bars.
        !            18: 
        !            19:        3) the cut and paste stuff is a complete crock.  The user interface to
        !            20: it is very primative.  We are also not handling the pty properly, causing the
        !            21: hang problem with paste.
        !            22: 
        !            23:        4) lots more stuff can now be done since there is now a menu
        !            24: package.
        !            25: 
        !            26:        5) highlighting when doing cut operations.
        !            27: 
        !            28:        6) changing fonts on the fly.
        !            29: 
        !            30:        7) should put an entry in /etc/utmp when being rsh'd.  (Simple,
        !            31: but didn't have time this time around).
        !            32: 
        !            33:        8) completion of the 4014 emulation.
        !            34: 
        !            35:        9) the backing store for the tek emulator is just the bytestream
        !            36: originally sent.  Refresh could be many times faster if a proper
        !            37: display list were maintained instead of having to reparse the byte stream.
        !            38: 
        !            39:        10) partial exposures in the Tek emulator could be much better
        !            40: if a transparent window were placed over the area affected, cutting down
        !            41: the unnessary painting.
        !            42: 
        !            43:        11) clean up main.c....
        !            44: 
        !            45:        12) resize should be able to generate strings for the Bourne shell.
        !            46: 
        !            47:        13) figure out what we're doing wrong with SIGHUP on exit (code is
        !            48: notdef'd out to aviod disaster when you are root; it was logging everyone
        !            49: out simultaneously!).  Sighup should be sent to the process group when
        !            50: xterm exits.
        !            51: 
        !            52:        14) scroll bars.
        !            53: 
        !            54:        15) multiple pages being saved....
        !            55: 
        !            56: And so on until it is a completely different program...  Might be worth
        !            57: starting from scratch.....  Or go write a base editor for X.
        !            58: 
        !            59:                                Jim Gettys
        !            60:                                January 1986

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