Re: Terminology in multi-tty primitives

[Chong Yidong]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> Here, `terminal' is a catch-all term for an input/output device,
>> including both ttys (text-only terminals) and X/Win32-win/Nextstep
>> (graphical terminals).  In contrast, tty should always refer to
>> text-only terminals.
>
> But there's no delete-tty or suspend-terminal.

That seems consistent to me.  The delete-terminal function does
something useful on both text and graphical terminals: for ttys, it
returns control of the tty to the shell; on X, it closes the X
connection.  On the other hand, suspending only makes sense for
text-only terminals: it is used to temporarily return control to the
shell.  There is no analogous operation on graphical displays.  Thus, we
provide suspend-tty rather than suspend-terminal.