Posted inInformation Technology

XJed Looks

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
xjed screen shot

Since nobody voiced an objection, I wanted to record this here where the pictures would survive. Chris wrote on the jed mailing list that he applied the CBrief patch to create a pretty good Brief clone under Linux, the xjed display didn’t look right.

Personally, I have horrible memories of Brief, but, I must admit, it did have fans back in the day. Back in the DOS and OS/2 days I was more a fan of vEdit. At least until I started using Watcom for most of my PC development.

So, Chris ran into a display problem. Terminal Jed looked and worked great!

Jed screen shot

But xjed, not so much.

xjed screen shot

My knee-jerk response was the 12 year old boys maintaining the terminal hacking and hacking and hacking away anything which could remotely be called VT-100 support. They all claim VT-100 support, but,The VT100 mode of every free terminal on Linux isn’t even close to
VT100 compatible. You have to hack and override a vast number of
definitions. Minor discussion here.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.os.vms/linux$20vt100$20emulation%7Csort:date/comp.os.vms/WTSEx6j7qTc/3GsFMSAMBgAJ

Wee bit of rehash here:

Xterm and VT Emulation

Even more discussion here

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.os.vms/linux$20vt100$20emulation%7Csort:date/comp.os.vms/9DIFTtYLpn0/SOhgHPFXOAAJ

My guess is, with a much older distro, your changes work fine, just
like my xterm script worked fine for decades. Recently there has been
yet another regression of VT100 support. My script stopped working if
my login.com had

$ SET TERM/INQ

which means to inquire from the terminal what its settings should be
and then tell the OS.

Those backward question marks are a red flag. Seen them many times
trying to use various terminals to communicate with VMS systems. I
would suggest trying the VT102 stuff from the first discussion link.
It may not be a final answer, but, it should make a big improvement.

I will guess this VT100 regression happened the way most of them do.
Someone bitched to the 12 year old “maintaining” the package that
keystroke blah or terminal string yaha didn’t let them use some
feature of VIM they really wanted and both of them together knowing
less-than-zero about either OpenVMS or a VT100, hacked it, took out
whatever automated tests that failed, and checked it in.

While that was a statistical possibility, Morten Bo Johansen posted what proved to be the answer. It was a font problem.

Try adding

 UXjed*font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1

to your ~/.Xresources file. Remember to do a

 xrdb -merge .Xresources

to activate the change.

Now, all we need is for Chris to park his source and build somewhere so anyone else who wants Jed with the CBrief patch can have it.

Update Sunday July 15, 2018

I installed xjed and did some playing around on KDE Neon this afternoon. The first thing you need to know is that changing a value in .Xresources and re-running the merge command doesn’t get you anything. You need to remove what you did wrong.

xrdb -remove

This is what I ended up with.

xjed ~/.Xresources

xjed screenshot

 

For those who cannot see the image or cannot scroll around:

$ cat ~/.Xresources
UXjed*font: -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal–18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1
xjed*Geometry: 132×36

Most of you couldn’t see the first line anyway since I have .jedrc set to hide the menu, popping up with I hit <Esc> and one of the main menu keys.

You can find a list of fonts with their sizes and supported characters here. You shouldn’t need to download anything. If you read some of the page you will see the fonts periodically get rolled into XFree86 and X11. What you do need to know from there is the name to use.

The Geometry line tells Jed I want 132 columns and 36 rows to start. I put it after the font in case it was calculated immediately based on some default font.

Assuming I use xjed more I will need to read more of this link so I can get cutting and pasting to the system buffer working. I just need to add some keyboard shortcuts to my .jedrc file. By default, at least for me, cutting and pasting didn’t work. Then again I have CUA enabled and that might play into it.

One final note, you are supposed to provide a screen position with the rows and columns of geometry. Most examples you see will be something like 132×36+100+100. I originally did that, but I have my monitors swapped. Yes, I could have played around and figured out how big of a value I needed to come up on my main monitor, but, it seems to default to wherever I’m at so I don’t mind ignoring that “Where is command” message.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.