Zugg Software :: View topic

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Some thing I noticed when trying the cMUDPro shareware:
1. No support for mouse control (try run "links" in Putty and you can actually click links)
2. Lack of unicode support.
3. The colour support dosn't seem to work in all cases. Emacs was black & white Sad

.
4. Closing emacs doesn't work? ( ah you have to manually activate that ctrl+alt act as ctrl)
5. Running "top" outputs "garbage"
6. How do you send the alt-key?
7. "Sometimes" when using Emacs text mysteriously go invisible or otherwise is not drawn correctly. Try especially to write C++ code in it, and odd things can start occur.

The scrolling in cMUDPro feels a lot smoother than in Putty which is very nice.

Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 5:32 am

1) CMUD/CMUDPro doesn't automatically recognize links. You can easily create a trigger for this using the #URL command however.

2) CMUD doesn't support Unicode, so there is no surprise that CMUDPro doesn't have unicode. SSH isn't going to make any difference with that fact, and it's not going to change until Delphi support Unicode, and all the 3rd party components used in CMUD support Unicode, and then I modify my own CMUD stuff to use Unicode.

3) If it is using standard ANSI color sequences, then it should work fine. Otherwise you'll need to capture a debug log of exactly what emacs is sending to try and change color so I can look at it. I don't use emacs anymore myself.

4) Yes, use Ctrl+Alt+key to send control keys to the server.

5) You'll need to capture this in a debug log so I can see what it is sending. Works fine on my *nix box.

6) Not sure what you mean. The "Alt-key" is a Windows thing and doesn't correspond to any ASCII code, so there is no way to "send it" to the server. You'll need to tell me more about what you are trying to do on the server.

7) Again, I'd need a detailed debug log on this.

In general, please remember the normal bug reporting policies. You'll need to provide me a detailed procedure for reproducing any problems, and when using other server software such as emacs, I'll need detailed #DEBUGFILE log files showing the exact codes sent by the server.

None of this should be related to SSH. If these things all work fine in regular CMUD and not in CMUDPro, then let me know. SSH just changes the sock layer communication and shouldn't be messing with any of the higher level stuff like you are talking about.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

I thought the text-based browser was called "lynx" and not "links."

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Adept Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 246

Two things:

1) When interacting with a lot of screen based programs (including the shell), control-chars are used a lot. Having to use Ctrl-Alt to do this all time would be pretty much a non-starter for me.

2) Many telnet clients react to ALT-key by sending the two character sequence ESC+key.

Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 7:49 pm

1) If you have the keyboard focus in the actual output window (and have Character Mode enabled), then CMUD should work like a normal Telnet/SSH client and will send control-key characters properly. The need to use Alt-Ctrl-Key is only when you are using the command line, since the Ctrl-keys are used in the command line for Windows stuff like Copy/Paste.

2) If you can point me to some web page with documentation on this "standard", then I might be able to implement it.

Rorso: The zuggsoft.com server uses a stripped-down linux distribution that WolfPaw installs. I don't know what specific distribution it is based upon, but it is optimized for server use and has a lot of stuff set up specially for increased security. I might eventually install a Linux distribution on one of my older computers (if I can get enough pieces together that actually work), but that's a pretty low priority for me. If you have a recommendation of which linux distribution I should use, let me know.

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

Adept Joined: 04 Feb 2005 Posts: 246

I'm not sure the translation of ALT-key to ESC+key is a "standard" but it grew out of the usage of the EMACS editor, I'm oretty sure.

In those early days, EMACS was developed on the ITS OS, which used, if I recall, a 9-bit character set (given that the PDP-10 had 36-bit words, non-byte-addressable). With the 7-bit ASCII set, that left two bits left over. One was called Control and the other Meta. These were or'ed in to other characters, so you could have Control and Meta applied to any character in the set (including the ASCII control characters, so yes, you could have Control-Ctrl-A as well as having Control-A being different from Control-a, and combinations like Control-Meta-A).

When EMACS started being ported to other OSes that only used 7 bit characters (this was well before the day of 8-bit charsets), it used the ASCII control characters for its "Control", but there was no way to encode Meta. So it evolved that the sequence ESC+key meant Meta-key.

Fast-forwarding to today, where windowing systems allow full keyboard interpretation, EMACS once again started supporting the concept of Meta by using the Alt key. But that only works in direct window systems, and when going through a TCP connection, like telnet, rlogin, etc. you still have to use ESC (while the 8th bit could be used for this, it isn't so that 8-bit charsets can be supported). So, some telnet clients provide support for ALT-key to be sent as the two character sequence ESC+key. Once you get used to using ALT like this, it's hard to remember to go back to using ESC. Using EMACS is like learning to play a piano, in that *everything* that you do that's not inserting a character uses some sort of Ctrl or Meta-characters (it's a non-moded design, unlike vi).

One such client is Absolute Telnet, which can be found at http://www.celestialsoftware.net/

Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 5:45 pm

Zhiroc: Thanks for the extra info and history about that...it was very interesting. I'll add an option to the wish-list for the future to have Alt-key converted into ESC key when in Character mode in CMUD.

Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2008 8:56 pm

OK, I have made some fixes to this in v2.26. I found the correct method to add a keyboard hook and capture stuff before the rest of the application sees it. So in v2.26, pressing Ctrl-key when in Character Mode will properly send the Ctrl-key to the server (as long as Macros override Menu shortcuts preference is enabled). Pressing Alt-key when in Character Mode will send ESC-key to the server (again, with Macros override Menu shortcuts enabled).

I didn't add any separate option for the Alt-key -> ESC-key. I'm just using the "macros override menu shortcut" option to basically override the default key mapping. This should make character mode a bit more useful in v2.26.