Re: [screen-devel] Requested feature: reduce bloat!

[Micah Cowan]

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David Douthitt wrote:
> I simply cannot take in all of the features that screen has (vertical 
> split? check. alternate xterm buffer? check.  Full stdin/stdout 
> piping capability? check. Extended registers? check.  Macros? check. 
> 256 colors? check. Multiuser? check. Scriptability? coming.)
> 
> How about we *strip out* some of the "features" and get screen back to 
> lean and mean instead of turning it into some sort of monster...

Several of the things you mentioned above are in fact optional.

All of them are also useful. I'm certainly hoping we aren't going to be
adding too much more on top of what we have, but scriptability will
almost certainly be one of them--that has the particular benefit of
allowing folks to add as much bloat as they want, without making it a
part of the core "screen"; and it too should also be optional. It also
has the benefit of giving an opportunity to deprecate existing features
that are (IMO) clumsily designed (such as the string escapes).

I'm certainly not going to advocate throwing out the last couple years'
worth of work that the existing maintainers did, and since they are also
still co-maintaining screen, you'll probably find it difficult to
convince them.

If there are features we have that are "bloat" that are not optional, we
will definitely accept patches that make them optional. If you want
something that doesn't even have these features, you're welcome to look
into some of the more lightweight alternatives that are out there (I'll
confess to a limited knowledge of them); or feel free to fork your own.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
GNU Maintainer: wget, screen, teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
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