1 Copyright (c) 2008 James McKenzie <james@fishsoup.dhs.org>,
4 $Id: README,v 1.2 2008/03/10 11:49:32 james Exp $
6 Sympathy is a replacement for screen(1), minicom(1) and consolidate(1).
7 It is a VT52/VT100/ANSI terminal emulator with some special features. In
8 normal use sympathy would sit between a terminal device (a serial port or
9 a pseudo-tty) and the user’s usual terminal emulator (eg xterm(1)).
10 Sympathy renders data from the terminal device into an internal frame
11 buffer and then expresses changes in this frame buffer to the outer terminal
12 emulator using a small subset of ANSI escape codes. Sympathy always
13 generates valid escape codes to the outer ter- minal, and will reset the state
14 of its internal terminal emulator when it detects receive errors on the
17 Sympathy, unlike screen(1), takes care to preserve the scroll-back fea-
18 tures of the outer terminal emulator: lines that scroll off the top of the
19 internal frame buffer are scrolled off the top of the outer termi- nal
20 emulator. When sympathy is used in client/server mode, some history is added to
21 the outer terminal emulator when the client connects.
23 Sympathy also supports automatic baud-rate detection, and advanced log-
24 ging features. Sympathy logs whenever any of the modem control lines change
25 state, receive errors, and the contents of any line on the frame buffer as the