Re: New Command Window widget as GSoC project?

[John W. Eaton]

On 3/12/19 4:23 PM, Mike Miller wrote:

> As I understand it, the idea was proposed years ago to make the command
> window *not* be a true terminal emulator, instead develop a brand new
> command window widget that is more like an interactive text area. So all
> prompting, input, and output would be done with Qt.

Yes, that has been my plan for a long time now, but I haven't had 
sufficient time to actually do the work.

> This might make it easier to do things like move the cursor back through
> the buffer, insert hyperlinks into error messages and doc strings, and
> have a common implementation on all operating systems.

Having the same implementation on all systems would be good.  We could 
also eliminate the separate driver program on Unixy systems that does a 
setsid call to give up the controlling terminal (necessary for less to 
work properly as the pager).  At one time I thought this change to the 
command window could also improve interrupt handling but now I'm not 
sure.  We would lose the ability to execute text-based programs in the 
command window (for example, using "system ('emacs -nw')") but that's 
not fully functional now anyway, so we're not losing much.

jwe