[GRASS-dev] return of the OSX xterm question

[William Kyngesburye]

On Apr 9, 2007, at 12:53 PM, Glynn Clements wrote:

>> It's a general OSX problem/quirk when running any .app application
>> from the CLI.  If the application is already running, you don't get a
>> new window in the application (or whatever the default action is,
>> depending on what is passed to it).  New instances of whole
>> applications is not the way to run OSX apps.
>>
>> Instead, you must tell the system to open a file with a particular
>> application (the 'open' CLI command) so the system can take care of
>> deciding whether the application is already running.
>
> That doesn't address my point.
>
> What is the problem with having each terminal window belong to a
> separate process? Or, from a different perspective, what is the
> advantage to having a single process manage multiple terminal windows?
>
> I can see some advantages for a browser, but not for a terminal.
>
Hmm.  Sorry to beat this so much...

The basic OSX answer is that a single process (for an application) is  
the way OSX works.  Though commands that are run in a Terminal window  
spawn their own processes.

One practical answer is that each application process (but not  
spawned CLI processes) shows up in the OSX Dock.  All have only the  
name of the application, ie "Terminal".

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

"We are at war with them. Neither in hatred nor revenge and with no  
particular pleasure I shall kill every ___ I can until the war is  
over. That is my duty."

"Don't you even hate 'em?"

"What good would it do if I did? If all the many millions of people  
of the allied nations devoted an entire year exclusively to hating  
the ____ it wouldn't kill one ___ nor shorten the war one day."

<Ha, ha> "And it might give 'em all stomach ulcers."

- Tarzan, on war