Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utcsstat.UUCP 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.