On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 8:43 PM ZB <zbigniew2...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 05:07:14PM -0400, dmccunney wrote: > > > One of the most popular was Chris Dunford's CED. The following from > > the CED docs is relevant: > > Thanks, I'll try to examine it. Still my suggestion is to make all these > tools of FreeDOS, that offer command line - better. There's really no valid > reason _not_ to use these few keys present on every PC's keyboard. Neither > there was any in the past as well - as I think about this today maybe > "command history" had to be invented, but why MS$ didn't order their > programmers to make use out of that keys too - no idea. Maybe simply > "because those utilities were still usable with poor quality command-line".
> Not that convincing rationale considering rather modest overhead necessary On something like *nix, the GNU readline library can provide it. Overhead is low because it's a shared library rather than inline code in applications that use it. But it requires the OS to support a shared library function, and the GPL can be a deal breaker. The GPL is viral, and the license makes any code that links against Gnu code also covered by the GPL. That's a deal breaker for a lot of open source products that are explicitly *not* issued under the GPL. (As a huge example, Google does not use GPLed code in anything they do, and won't. They need to reinvent that particular wheel due to incompatible licensing.) Granted, the *hardware* resources required for something like this is low. The main resource constraint is *developer* time. Just who will *make* these changes? (A lot of what people have expressed a desire for on the FreeDOS list is sophisticated system level programming, and the kind of folks who can do it tend to want to be *paid* for that sort of effort. They won't do it for free.) The advantage if available for using a TSR is that it's effectively a shared library whose functionality can be available to any DOS programming running where it is installed. In the case in question, CED (and other similar products) features are available to any application using DOS function 0AH to get input. You might start by looking at what DOS programs you think could benefit from this use to get input. A change to using 0AH makes the functionality of a TSR like CED available in them, and is likely simpler and less intrusive than building in command line recall and editing. And the TSR can generally be loaded "high". > regards, > Zbigniew ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
