Discussion

(08:17:58 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: Kosai, Monia: I was thinking today, a great way to make the screen integration happen
(08:18:12 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: Kosai, Monia: is to develop screen to expose a library interface
(08:18:31 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: that should be /very/ easy, and makes all the hard items in my list very trivial
(08:21:42 PM) Kosai: Ooh.
(08:22:25 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: Kosai: so, you just call screen_session_show_screen_number (session, 4) to switch to the fourth tab
(08:22:46 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: which is just what the magic keybindings are doing right now
(08:23:00 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: nothing to implement in screen, just expose them.
(08:23:14 PM) Monia: right
(08:24:04 PM) Kosai: Woo.
(08:24:27 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: so we don’t have to do any magic in vte/g-t to send control sequences to screen to change to another tab
(08:24:47 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: (which is possible in the case of tab switching, but not for copy/paste, search, …)
(08:25:10 PM) Kosai: Yup.  Sounds perfect.
(08:25:17 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: in the long term, if that looks robust enough
(08:25:26 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: we can tear the scrolling support off vte
(08:25:52 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: and since screen allows for attaching to a session (readonly / readwrite), we get model/view separation for free
(08:26:04 PM) Kosai: And have a hard dep on screen?
(08:26:07 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: yeah
(08:26:13 PM) Kosai: Cool.
(08:26:13 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: that’s for the long term
(08:26:50 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: screen is probably a lot smarter than g-t in handling odd sequences
(08:27:01 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: so we are just piggybacking on it
(08:28:43 PM) Kosai: Sounds like we get to ditch a lot of g-t code.
(08:30:03 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: not g-t really, vte mostly.
(08:30:17 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: kinda “use screen as a backend” feature in vte
(08:30:24 PM) Kosai: right.
(08:30:30 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: that’s of course for the “implicit” part
(08:30:39 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: for explicit, we need some menus in g-t
(08:31:16 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: but if we go that route, then g-t doesn’t really have to create new widgets for each tab
(08:31:21 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: and can use screen’s tab support
(08:31:29 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: but that may not be feasible
(08:31:40 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: maybe as long as tabs are using the same profile
(08:32:14 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: or better yet, we can add the notion of tab into vte itself
(08:32:32 PM) Kosai: Yeah, gets confusing if the user has some local terminals (implicitly inside screen) and some remote ones inside a non-vte screen.
(08:32:57 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: yeah, got to decide what to do there
(08:34:55 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: in the mean time we can actually import our hacked screen in vte
(08:35:04 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: so, no dependency, no upgrades
(08:35:22 PM) Kosai: Hm.
(08:35:43 PM) Behdad Esfahbod: and when we are satisfied with the screen api, we can start pushing it upstream
(08:36:05 PM) Kosai: *nod*