FTE editor

["Paul M. Foster" <paulf@quillandmouse.com>]

Debs:

I'm testing out the fte editor included in Debian 2.0. It does an odd
thing: I runs in some sort of "raw" mode, and needs r/w access to
/dev/vcsa* devices. One of the effects is that you can't hit Alt-Fn to get
to a different console; you have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Fn instead. A problem I
have is that the permissions on the /dev/vcsa* devices are generally
crx---------. This means that I can access the device as root, but when I
go to run it as a regular user, the program won't run because it can't get
r/w access to the device.

Two questions:

1) Is this a dangerous thing (I know of no other Linux editors that
access the terminal this way)?

2) Is there a liability to changing the permissions on these device files
so that regular users have r/w access to them?

Thanks,

Paul M. Foster