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Path: utzoo!utcsstat!geoff
From: geoff@utcsstat.UUCP (Geoffrey Collyer)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: generic hooter'n'waver proposal (offensive to Jean Yates & Mark Horton)
Message-ID: <1724@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Feb-84 02:02:53 EST
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1724
Posted: Tue Feb 14 02:02:53 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Feb-84 15:20:55 EST
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 93

To save the UNIX industry man-sagan-years (1 Sagan = billions and
billions) writing Yatesian ``full-screen, user-friendly, full-function''
software, I propose a generic hooting-and-waving front end, hootnwave.
hootnwave(1) follows:
---
.TH HOOTNWAVE 1 brain-damaged
.SH NAME
hootnwave \- user-friendly, full-screen, full-function generic front-end
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B hootnwave
\(bv user-hostile-partial-screen-half-function-command
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Hootnwave
may be prepended to any non-full-screen pipeline to transform it
into a wonder of modern ergonomic design.
.PP
.I Hootnwave
switches its standard input to CBREAK mode,
and for each character read,
prints
.PP
.ft B
.in +.5i
.nf
You have just typed the character ``\fIc\fP''.
Did you really want to type that?
Type y for yes, n for no and e for edit.
.fi
.in -.5i
.ft R
.PP
If the user types
.BR y ,
the character is accepted,
if
.BR n ,
the character is rejected,
if
.BR e ,
the user is popped into the editor named by the environment variable
EDITOR with the character as the input buffer
and if anything else,
the user is assaulted with a user-friendly explanation
excerpted from the you-typed-a-not-newline-at-the-colon lecture of
.IR readnews (1).
.PP
After the above processing,
the current line is written to
.I /dev/tty
without a trailing newline
and the character,
if accepted,
is written to standard output.
.SH SEE ALSO
RT-11
.SH EXAMPLES
.IR vi (1)
may be written as
.PP
.ti +.5i
hootnwave \(bv ed
.PP
.IR more (1)
may be written as
.PP
.ti +.5i
hootnwave \(bv cat
.PP
and the 4.2BSD
.IR talk (1)
may be written as
.PP
.ti +.5i
hootnwave \(bv write
.SH ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The name
.I hootnwave
is a contraction of the phrase ``hooting and waving\(rg'',
first used by Laura Creighton in a USENET article
to describe a spelling corrector that took ten minutes to
check a small document,
but
.I wow
those were
.I fun
minutes;
never a dull moment as the spelling corrector exercised and
diagnosed every feature of the terminal.
.SH BUGS
Isn't complicated enough for the Yates crowd.
---

Geoff Collyer, U. of Toronto.