Re: vc scrollback

David Holland (dholland@hcs.harvard.edu)
Tue, 10 Oct 1995 15:17:36 -0400 (EDT)

> > I believe the whole vc system is fundamentally flawed. It is not the
> > kernel's business to do console scrolling or console switching. That's
> > to be done by a user process, namely by screen, available from all GNU
> > sites. It multiplexes a character terminal, giving you all the
>
> ABSOLUTELY. Great idea. The more mature Linux gets, the more we (he? :)
> should filter out things that were really put in there to make
> development nicer, etc. It saves memory, etc.

WRONG. Very bad idea. The VCs are *the* thing that makes Linux useable
without X running. There are lots of low-end machines that this is
vital for. Linux is, to some extent, the only useful system supporting
such machines. It would be wrong to remove this support.

Furthermore, as other people have pointed out, VC switching is
extraordinarily useful. I have my syslog scrolling up on one VC. I
don't have to log out to let somebody else use the console.

Screen doesn't cut it. Maybe if somebody patches it so it can use a
sequence of more than one character as its escape it will have a
chance of being useful. Maybe. It's still a highly inferior system.

-- 
   - David A. Holland             | Average number of times an American 
     dholland@hcs.harvard.edu     | opens the refrigerator each day: 22