Re: Remove delay in `tset`

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2024-03-08T21:51:30+0000, Tim Hutt wrote:
> Would it be possible to remove the 1 second delay from `reset` (which
> is symlinked to `tset` on most systems)? Or failing that, reduce it to
> 100ms.
> 
> It's quite annoying, and as far as I understand it entirely
> unnecessary in 2024. I couldn't find the exact reason it ever existed.
> Presumably it was just a hack to give the terminal time to reboot?

It _is_ documented in ncurses, and that _is_ the reason.

tset(1):
     •   unless the “-I” option is enabled, the terminal and tab
         initialization strings are sent to the standard error output,
         and tset waits one second (in case a hardware reset was
         issued).

If you've ever used a dumb terminal, you will be aware that a hardware
reset indeed takes measureable time to happen.

> I found one comment in some random code saying 'In 1979 3BSD's tset
> had a sleep(1) to let mechanical printer-and-ink8 terminals "settle
> down".' but I'm unsure if it was really because of mechanical
> terminals or if later ones needed time to reset too.

...even video terminals, in my experience, stop reading from the serial
line while hard-resetting.

> In any case, nobody uses real terminals any more, whereas millions of
> people use terminal emulators and have to endure the delay.

Why are you often having to reset your terminal?  Is some application
scrambling its state?  Are you filing bugs against it for not putting
things back the way it found them when starting up?

> Of course it is trivial to disable it for one system, but it is yet
> another thing I have to disable on every system I use, when I really
> shouldn't have to. The default should be sensible. Linux users
> everywhere will thank you!

You could use tput(1) instead of tset(1).

Conceivably, tset could be changed to check for the NCURSES_NO_PADDING
environment variable, which serves a similar purpose.  But I'm just
spitballing.

Regards,
Branden

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