High Latency Survival Tactics (Was: Re: Thunderbird stupid about X traffic?)

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Fri Sep 14 16:13:27 EDT 2007


On 9/14/07, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> I've attempted this on a satellite link ...

  Heh heh heh.  Me too(TM).  It's a different experience when you can
measure ping RTT using a hand-held stop watch.  :)

> Has anybody seen a line-mode-oriented shell?

  Stephen Bourne.  (According to Wikipedia, he's the "Bourne" in
"Bourne shell".)

  In other words, Unix was built to be friendly to such environments.
Our problems arise because we're used to everything being modern and
faster.  For example, to get the tty subsystem to stop echoing
characters, just use "stty -echo".  To tell Bash not to try doing
anything fancy, invoke it with the "--noediting" option.

  At that point, the hard part is finding a *terminal* that supports a
local line editing mode.  I think there might be an xterm or rxvt
option somewhere for this.  Maybe on one of the [CTRL]+click menus?
(I'm not at an xterm right now.)

  PuTTY does appear to support this, more-or-less, by going to
Settings -> Terminal -> Line discipline, and setting "Local echo" and
"Local line editing" both to "Force on".  The line editing appears to
be fairly primitive (backspace only), but it does appear to work.  (I
think.  It is hard to test without an actual high-latency link.)

  Then the hardest part is trying to figure out how to use "ed" to
edit text files.  Or maybe one of the TECO fans in the group can give
lessons on that.  ;-)

-- Ben


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