[BRLTTY] Revisiting (again and again) the continuus display issue

[Mario Lang]

Dave Mielke <dave at mielke.cc> writes:

>>As a user of a 88 cell display which is continuus (no space between "status 
>>cells" and the rest of the display), I asked about refactoring the status cell 
>>situation 
>
> What, again, was the precise issue? Why didn't we just define that
> particular model to have 88 columns?

I guess because then, status cell support would be missing for console
users who like to use it.

> I believe the recommended solution was to have a core option to define how
> many of the text cells to use as status cells.

And on which side... (left or right).
Ideally, there would be a pair of these settings, one
for console review, and one that defines what to do if
a BrlAPI client has focus.  Since BrlAPI clients have no way to
write to the status cells at all, I would like to
configure my display in the following way:
 * Use 80 + 8 (status cells on left side for ergonomic reasons) when
   reviewing console content.
 * 88 + 0 when a BrlAPI client has focus.

> If so, should it be a general option or should it be a
> driver-specific option? It seems that it should be driver-specific,
> if not model-specific, while still being implemented within the
> core.

I guess it is model-specific, specific to all models that are "continuous".
The ALVA satelite and HandyTech modular evolution come to mind.
Anyone else remember continuous models with odd cell count (i.e., not
20, 40 or 80 cells)?

> We don't currently have an option structure for this. Any
> suggestions?

No speicifc ones right now I'm afraid.
This new feature should probably be merged with the fs driver, or, in other
words, what the fs driver now supports via braille-parameters should probably
be folded into this new functionality.  As explained in my previous
mail, I once tried to duplicate the fs functionality in the ht driver,
and you suggested we should generalize this, instead of duplicating
code (which is a good idea, btw).

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