[BRLTTY] Using BrlAPI clients in tmux (wass: Linux console hacking (was: Re: Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux))

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi,

On 2026-04-08 at 14:25 +0200, Sébastien Hinderer <sebastien.hinderer at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
 > Aura Kelloniemi (2026/04/08 14:00 +0300):
 > > I consider the tmux terminal driver to be broken at the moment for two reasons:
 > >
 > > 1) The inefficiency mentioned above, and
 > > 2) The lack of support for running BrlAPI applications inside tmux.

 > Do you know about the WINDOWPATH environment variable that BrlAPI
 > clients can use to say where exactly they are running?

Yes, with WINDOWPATH I can force BrlAPI clients to take over the whole console
where tmux is running, but that's not what I want. I want BrlAPI to only take
control of one tmux window.

Now that I tested the tmux screen driver, the local brltty actually took over
the whole console system so that it always displays contents of tmux
regardless of which VT I switch to. I don't understand why this happens.

 > > I use BrlAPI applications regularly and I need to open a separate VT
 > > for working with them.

 > I am curious about which BrlAPI applications you are using regularly
 > because I am not aware of that many, actually. apart from Orca, of
 > course. Are those public, or are we talking about clients you wrote for
 > your own needs?

Mostly my own text file reader which supports continuous reading, searchiing
and position autosaving.

I once considered releasing the code, but it is not very clean, and
implementing a better reader would be a good idea.

-- 
Aura