A VALIANT LITTLE TERMINAL a VLT User's Manual
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SLAC-370tREV.4) A VALIANT LITTLE TERMINAL A VLT User’s Manual Amanda Weinstein SLAC-Report-370cREV.4) Revised August 1992 Prepared for the Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC03-76SF00515 I ? This document and the material and data contained therein, was devel- oped under sponsorship of the United States Government. Neither the United States nor the Department of Energy, nor the Leland Stanford Junior University, nor their employees, nor their respective contractors, subcontractors, or their employees, makes any warranty, express or im- plied, or assumes any liability or responsibility for accuracy, complete- ness or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product or process disclosed, or represents that its use will not infringe privately-owned rights. Mention of any product, its manufacturer, or suppliers shall not, nor is it intended to, imply approval, disapproval, or fitness for any particular use. A royalty-free, nonexclusive right to use and dis- seminate same for any purpose whatsoever, is expressly reserved to the United States and the University. I ;ft,;70( REV.4) Pi A VALIANT LITTLE TERMINAL A VLT User’s Manual Amanda Weinstein Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94309 August 1990 Revised December 1990 July 1991 September 1992 Prepared for the Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC03-76SF00515 Printed in the United States of America. Available from the National Technical Information Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield, Virginia 22161 \// \- A Valiant Little Terminal A VLT User’s Manual bY Amanda Weinstein Fourth Edition-August 1992 Trademarks and Copyrights IBM and VM/CMS are trademarks of International Business Machines. Ann Arbor and Ambassador are trademarks of Ann Arbor, Inc.. Modgraph is a trademark of Modgraph, Inc.. Digital, DEC, DECnet, VAX, and VMS are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation. Micom is a trademark of Micom Systems, Inc.. TEX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society. TxEd, TxEd Plus, FastFonts, and FunKeys are trademarks of Microsmiths, Inc.. Amiga, AmigaDOS, and Amiga Workbench are trademarks of Commodore-Amiga, Inc.. PostScript is a trademark of Adobe, Incorporated. Tektronix is a trademark of Tektronix, Inc.. ARexx, WShell, ConMan are copyright Wishful Thinking, Inc.. AmigaTEX is copyright Radical Eye Software, Inc.. ProVector is copyright Stylus Inc.. It’s-It is a registered trademark of It’s-It Ice Cream Co.. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Willy Langeveld, the creator of VLT, for assistance, discussion, and expla- nation, as well as the writing of Appendices C and D of this manual. Thanks as well to Marvin Weinstein, author of the original VLT manual, VLT, the Story, for the use of his efforts, his TEX as&stance, and the new VLT logo. We are also grateful to the BIX users whose questions formed the basis for the Troubleshooting section and to Suzanne Weinstein for the creation of the limited edition VLT T-shirt. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................ 1 An Introduction to VLT ................ 3 What It Does At SLAC: Terminal Emulation ..... 3 File Transfer .................... 4 ARexx and VLT .................. 5 FastFonts and VLT ................. 5 VLT Jr. ...................... 6 The VLT Manual ................. 6 2. Getting Started ....................... 7 Installation ...................... 9 Installing VLT From An Archive ........... 9 Other Files You May Need ..................... 10 Installation for SLAC Users ..................... 11 Installation Notes for 1.3 Users .................... 11 Installation for 2.0 Users ...................... 11 Upgrading from older versions of VLT ................ 11 Testing VLT ............................ 13 VLT’s Method of Searching Paths .................... 14 Starting Up .............................. 17 Starting Up VLT From the CL1 ................... 17 Starting Up VLT From the Workbench ................ 20 3. ,;The User Interface .............................. 23 Parameters and Menus ......................... 25 Text Screen Menus ........................... 27 The VLT Menu .......................... 27 The Communications Menu ..................... 28 The Paste Menu .......................... 31 The Transfer Menu ......................... 32 The Script Menu .......................... 35 The Screen Menu ......................... 36 The Operation Menu ........................ 40 User Menu ............................ 42 The Graphics Menu ........................ 42 Fifo Pipes in Detail ......................... 43 The Console Window In Detail .................... 44 View History in Detail ....................... 45 Program Mode In Detail ...................... 48 Mouse Support In Detail ...................... 49 Graphics Screen Menus ......................... 51 The Image Menu .......................... 51 The Zoom/Pan Menu ........................ 52 The Cursor Menu ......................... 52 The Screen Menu .......................... 52 The Operation Menu ........................ 53 The Control Menu ......................... 57 The Color Options Requester In Detail ................ 57 4. Writing Scripts ............................... 61 Introduction To VLT’s Scripting Facility ................. 63 Syntax . , . , . , . 63 Schedules . , . , . 64 Important script commands . 66 Mixing VLT and ARexx . 71 Quick Reference Section . 78 Some Conventions . 78 The Script Commands . 78 Conditions Recognized by the IF Command . 91 The Review Command . 91 5. Troubleshooting . 95 Troubleshooting . 97 Syntactical Questions, Tricks, and Bloopers . 97 Programming Problems . 99 Directory Dilemmas . 100 Data Flow Difficulties . 101 Review Buffer Riddles . 102 Miscellaneous Musings . 103 6. Appendices . 107 Appendix A The file requester . _ . 109 Using the Requester . 109 File Requester Menus . 111 The Control Menu . 111 Special Notes . 111 I Appendix B Parity . 112 . Bits, .Bytes, and Nybbles . 112 Even Parity . 112 Odd Parity . 113 Mark and Space Parities . 113 Stop Bits . 113 Parity Abbreviations . 113 Appendix C VLT’s Emulations . 114 Introduction . 114 VLT’s modes . 114 Sequences related to the Tektronix emulation . 114 Differences compared to standard VT100 . 115 Additional escape sequences . 115 Sending commands to VLT from the host . 116 Device Status Reports and Device Control String . 117 Appendix D Tektronix Programmer’s Manual . 118 Overview . 118 Sequences that change supermode . 119 Alpha mode . 120 Vector and point-plot (marker) mode . 121 Incremental Plot mode . 123 GIN mode . _ . 124 Tektronix4105/4107 . 124 Reports to the host . 127 Table of ASCII control characters . 130 - Appendix E ARP Escape Sequences . 132 The Escape Character and SET ESCAPE comand. 132 Escape Sequences ................. ...... 132 Appendix F ...................... ...... 133 The ARexx Phonebook facility ............ ...... 133 The lJeatStuf f Script ............... ...... 134 The SetHiscFlags Program ............. ...... 136 7. Index ........................... ...... 137 Index ......................... ...... 139 1 Introduction / I An Introduction to VLT LT came to be used at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), because SLAC wanted V to assess the Amiga’s usefulness as a color graphics terminal and ‘I$$ workstation. Before the project could really begin, the people at SLAC needed a terminal emulator which could successfully talk to the IBM 3081 (now the IBM ES9000-580) and all the VAXes on the site. Moreover, it had to compete in quality with the Ann Arbor Ambassador GXL terminals which were already in use at the laboratory. Unfortunately, at the time there was no commercial program which fit the bill. Luckily, Willy Langeveld had been independently hacking up a public domain VT100 emulator written by Dave Wecker et al. and the result, VLT, suited SLAC’s purposes. Over the years, as the program was debugged and rewritten, the original code disappeared, so that now, in the present version of VLT, none of the original VT100 code remains. Despite this, we nevertheless owe a debt of gratitude to the authors of the original program because it kept VLT on the air and functioning while the changes were taking place. Kudos also go to Joanne Dow, who allowed us to use her code for handling the serial port, Charlie Heath, for the use of his file requester, which turned into the ARP library, Carolyn Scheppner for the palette tool, and Dave Betz for his Bmodem code. Having this stuff to fall back upon made the job of creating VLT much easier and helped things run faster and more smoothly. Thanks, too, to Marvin Weinstein, Jim Kent, Jim Mackraz, Tom Rokicki, and others for various little snippets of code, to Rick Huebner, Steve Walton, Marco Papa, the Software Distillery, and Marc Boucher for writing the XPR file transfer protocols used by VLT, and to the many people, too numerous to name, who have served as beta testers. What It Does At SLAC: Terminal Emulation A good terminal program was one of the crucial links in establishing the Amiga as a feasible, cost effective terminal + TEX Workstation at SLAC. Therefore, VLT had to satisfy certain requirements. 1. First, it had to allow one to log onto IBM and VAX mainframes over various communications. links, telephone lines, the Micom Switch and the Bridge. This meant that various parity modes and protocols had to be supported and that it should be easy to switch between these modes. VLT supports baud rates from 110 to 57600, 15 parity modes, and four different handshaking protocols. 2. The