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

[Bill Freeman]

Bill McGonigle writes:
 ...
 > Has anybody seen a line-mode-oriented shell?  I'd love to edit my  
 > line locally and then send it in these situations rather than waiting  
 > for characters to echo back.

What you really want is a line mode terminal program.  One that lets
you edit locally, then, when you're happy, send it.  emacs actually
has a feature that you could use to try this out:

   M-x shell

(alt-x or esc followed by x, then it prompts you at the bottom of emacs's
window, and you type "shell" and hit enter)

This gives you an emacs (sub-)window talking to a shell, from which
you can invoke ssh (see, also M-x send-invisible when it prompts you
for a password, if someone else can see your screen).  You get to
type what you like, but it doesn't send it until you hit enter, so
you can edit to your heart's content.

There may actually be an ssh specific varient of this mode, but if
so, I haven't used it.

The tougher thing is if you want to send an incomplete line sometime.
Say, to request the remote shell to do filename completeion.  I'm not
sure how to do that (if there's a "send what you've got without a
trailing carriage return character" command, I haven't found it in the
docs).  I poked around the elisp once a few years ago, but didn't find
anything easy.

Another issue is (or was) applications using curses, since some
combination of the emacs terminal emmulation and the termtype didn't
work (though I seem to recall that it might be better now).

Bill