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<head>
<title>Manual Page</title>
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<pre>
</pre><h2>NAME</h2><pre>
enhance - A program that adds command-line editing to third
party programs.
</pre><h2>SYNOPSIS</h2><pre>
enhance command [ argument ... ]
</pre><h2>DESCRIPTION</h2><pre>
The enhance program provides enhanced command-line editing
facilities to users of third party applications, to which
one doesn't have any source code. It does this by placing a
pseudo-terminal between the application and the real termi-
nal. It uses the tecla command-line editing library to read
input from the real terminal, then forwards each just com-
pleted input line to the application via the pseudo-
terminal. All output from the application is forwarded back
unchanged to the real terminal.
Whenever the application stops generating output for more
than a tenth of a second, the enhance program treats the
latest incomplete output line as the prompt, and redisplays
any incompleted input line that the user has typed after it.
Note that the small delay, which is imperceptible to the
user, isn't necessary for correct operation of the program.
It is just an optimization, designed to stop the input line
from being redisplayed so often that it slows down output.
</pre><h2>DEFICIENCIES</h2><pre>
The one major problem that hasn't been solved yet, is how to
deal with applications that change whether typed input is
echo'd by their controlling terminal. For example, programs
that ask for a password, such as ftp and telnet, temporarily
tell their controlling terminal not to echo what the user
types. Since this request goes to the application side of
the psuedo terminal, the enhance program has no way of know-
ing that this has happened, and continues to echo typed
input to its controlling terminal, while the user types
their password.
Furthermore, before executing the host application, the
enhance program initially sets the pseudo terminal to noecho
mode, so that everything that it sends to the program
doesn't get redundantly echoed. If a program that switches
to noecho mode explicitly restores echoing afterwards,
rather than restoring the terminal modes that were previ-
ously in force, then subsequently, every time that you enter
a new input line, a duplicate copy will be displayed on the
next line.
</pre><h2>FILES</h2><pre>
libtecla.a - The tecla library.
~/.teclarc - The tecla personal customization file.
</pre><h2>SEE ALSO</h2><pre>
<a href="libtecla.html">libtecla(3)</a>
</pre><h2>AUTHOR</h2><pre>
Martin Shepherd (mcs@astro.caltech.edu)
</pre>
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