[BRLTTY] Revisiting (again and again) the continuus displayissue

[Mario Lang]

"Lee Maschmeyer" <lee_maschmeyer at wayne.edu> writes:

> Why shut off 40-cell displays? Not long ago I suggested a BrailleLite user 
> might like status cells, thinking since it was a Blazie device which got 
> merged into FS the same driver was used, but of course it isn't.
> It can come in handy sometimes though, such as when viewing a text
> file, 72 or 6 character lines, in grade 2.

Status cell emulation in general might indeed be useful, but its
a little bit of a different topic, although similar in places.
Thinking about that usage pattern, it might make sense to make the
status cell configuration part of the preferences menu, so that it
could be reconfigured at runtime, without restarting brltty.
Thats at least pretty similar to what HandyTech does in its
Windows driver, they allow you to configure status cell size and
location at runtime via a configuration menu.  IIRC, there is also a key
binding for switching status cell emulation off and on.

So on second thought, we should probably consider every display without
explicit status cells a continuous display, and those with status cells
as a immutable configuration (since software cant change hardware).

And BrlAPI clients should probably always see the full length of continuous
displays til we have a API for status cells.  So clients can
emulate status cells on their own in the meantime, if they want to.

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