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Annotation of 43BSD/contrib/X/xterm/README, revision 1.1.1.1

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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