 | | Some programs cannot use canonical mode. For example, consider the vi editor (or emacs, if you prefer). The editor's commands are single characters that must be acted upon immediately, without waiting for the user to press return. Thus, we need a way to obtain input from the user in units of characters, rather than lines. Furthermore, some of the commands used by the editor are special to the terminal driver and are not normally passed to the reading program (e.g., CTRL-D, the default EOF character, tells vi to scroll down half a screen, and CTRL-R, the REPRINT character, tells emacs to search in the reverse direction). So, we need a way to turn off these special meanings, as well. | |
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