Re: [groff] 04/05: {g, n}roff.1.man: Give assistance to pager users.

[Damian McGuckin]

On Wed, 3 Jul 2019, John Gardner wrote:

> > *Some terminals, the Tek 401x series especially, could* *be configured 
> > to tell the host to stop sending text on* *a "page full" condition. 
> > Some sent the proper RS-232**hardware signals, some sent 
> > <ctrl-s>/<ctrl-x>.*
>
> Really? That's interesting. What did <ctrl-s> do? On the terminal emulators
> I have on hand at the moment, none of them are responding or behaving
> differently.
>
> I always assumed terminals had some form of paging ability, no matter how
> rudimentary, but I see how wrong I was....

At the risk of showing my age, in the very LATE 1970s, there was a program 
at UNSW called 'pg' which did paging on CRT screens. There wete 24 lines 
per page unless over-ridden on the command line. The tool was real unix 
tool, lean and mean with only a few arguments. It was far less functional 
than either 'more' or 'less' but it did let you page through a file or 
STDIN nicely. You had to pipe things through 'col' first in some cases and 
'pg' generally played nicely with half-line motions from memory (which is 
really being stretched). I liked 'pg'. More seems overkill. A shame we 
lost it. I think there is another tool out there are several tools called 
'pg' in the last 20 years but it is not the same as the original. One is 
not even a pager but I cannot remember what it is.

There is a lean+mean tool called 'pg' on Github but it is no relation to 
the one to which I refer. It is super, super basic.

Regards - Damian

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