[BusyBox] [PATCH] New comm applet

[Larry Doolittle]

> I bet Rainer could win Rob over by writing a non-bloated
> screen abstraction layer, and porting busybox to use it.
> Unfortunately, that's a lot of work, and most people
> (back to the demographic thing) would not benefit, since
> the existing hard-coded ANSI strategy works fine for them.

After actually looking at the busybox-1.00 code, I see
I may have overestimated the work needed.  The only
non-trivial cases are ls, vi, and cmdedit.  One might
even see code shrinkage, since there is some overlap
between vi and cmdedit.  Compare
  vi's  place_cursor()   with cmdedit's  input_backward()
  vi's  print_literal()  with cmdedit's  cmdedit_set_out_char()

A set of about ten routines, starting with vi's
   clear_to_eol
   clear_to_eos
   standout_start
   standout_end
look like they could cover all busybox's needs.
They would normally print out ANSI sequences, but
could be hooked to anything else that Rainer thought
would be useful on obscure terminals.  If these
routines were inlined, the binary code size penalty
would be close to zero.

Not that I'm volunteering to actually do the work,
of course.  :-)

        Larry
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