Re: Problem to read the entire screen on Sid with BRLTTY
Boris Daix <Boris.Daix@insa-lyon.fr> writes:
> Mario Lang <mlang@debian.org> writes:
>
> [...]
>
>> What exactly did you change? I suggest trying out the readline interface,
>> which is line-based.
>
> I have some similar display troubles with modconf on woody : modconf
> seems to use whiptail. Is "dialog" meaning "whiptail" in debconf
> config for sid ?
Hmm, I just had a look at debconf sources, and it appears that:
1. Debconf/FrontEnd/Dialog.pm uses either dialog or whiptail, depending on what
is installed
2. On my system, when using dialog with debconf, I get the behaviour I
described in the mail earlier. I wonder if dialog on woody behaves the
same, or if there is just some switch we are missing, and which got lost,
which would activate proper cursors behaviour.
3. When I install whiptail, debconf starts to use it, and I see the following:
The cursor appears exactly one line below the actually highlighted line
in a select box.
Using Tab moves between the buttons, and the list, as expected.
1 is a good thing :-), 2 should be investigated, and 3 should probably
be filed as a bug against whiptail, if that wasn't done already...
Further digging showed that dialog in sid appears to just not use
the cursor for highlighting list items. I didn't find any command-line option
for either dialog or whiptail which would enable this. Hmm, maybe this
should be filed as a wishlist item against dialog *and* whiptail.
> (I didn't have any troubles with debconf on woody, that seems to use
> dialog).
Strange, as said, dialog does not appear to do "The Right Thing" for me.
If you use dialog on woody manually, something like
$ dialog --menu "Hello" 10 50 6 id1 one id2 two id3 three id4 four id5 five id6 six
does the cursor follow the selection?
> I suspect a display bug from dialog or whiptail used with BRLTTY (I
> didn't test without BRLTTY).
I highly doubt that any brltty specific thing is involved here, it is just
related to how certain full-screen terminal programs handle the position
of the cursor.
>> Oh, I just took the time to check, and can now see what your problem probably
>> is. debconf's dialog interface highlights items
>> in a select box with attribute colour. You can only change between
>> the Buttons at the bottom (OK and Cancel, or Yes and No) using
>> the normal cursor. I dont really remember if that was always this way,
>> since I'm quite adapted to attribute highlighting programs and tend to do the
>> "looking for the highlight" quite automatically. You can do this
>> by changing brltty into attribute view mode, and look for the line
>> which is probably currently highlighted. Then move the cursor up and down,
>> and watch the highlighted line move. Do this until you're sure that it is
>> highlighting the item you actually want to select. You might want to switch
>> between attribute and text mode several times to achieve this. Sometimes,
>> this can also be done by using the attribute underlining mode of brltty, but
>> that only works in some cases, I didn't particularily check
>> if that works in debconf dialog though.
>
> Usually, <TAB> allows to change from display object to display object
> (from lists to checkboxes, buttons, etc). If not, it should :-)
In whiptail, it behaves like that here, in dialog, it does not.
> But sure, the attribute mode of BRLTTY is very nice.
>
>> Hope this helps
>>
>> P.S. to Boris: This should be explained in the HOWTO.
>
> You mean "choosing a good frontend with debconf&co" ?
Yes.
> Sure. I guess "attribute tips" are documented upstream.
That should be correct yes, OTOH, a short intro to the problem in general might
fit somewhere since we'll reference the problem several times I guess. The
lynx.cfg SHOW_CURSOR:TRUE option for instance addresses the same issues.
--
CYa,
Mario | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/>
| Get my public key via finger mlang@db.debian.org
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