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
features you have now with the current vc (plus scrollback) minus the
shortcomings.
It even has cut and paste without mouse support (if you run another
screen session in an xterm [which I do, couldn't live without it], you
can even cut and paste between console and xterm). It could probably
be made a little bit more mouse aware; right now I use it together
with selection and that works fine.
Adopting it would also significantly simplify the kernel. Furthermore,
it's portable and provides a uniform terminal-switching interface among
all platforms.
At the very least, I'd like to have a kernel configure option to
switch off the whole vc business. To me, it does more harm than good.
Axel
-- Axel Boldt * boldt@math.ucsb.edu * http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/