DISPLAYS(5)

💖 DISPLAYS(5) — bestie edition 💖

okay so this is the manual page for displays, aka the Display Configuration File, from the File Formats Manual. sit down, grab a boba, we're gonna vibe through it 🧋✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

displays — the Display Configuration File, fr fr. it's giving "matchmaker for your terminals" 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so like. the interactive graphics programs Caesar, Magic, and Gremlin are lowkey extra and use two separate terminals at once:

• a text terminal where you type commands 🎀
• a color graphics terminal where the pretty pictures show up 🌈

and to make these two besties find each other, the programs use a displays file to associate each text terminal with its corresponding display device. no cap. 🫶

the displays file is an ASCII text file with one line for each text terminal/graphics terminal pair. every single line has 4 items separated by spaces:

1. the name of the port attached to a text terminal
2. the name of the port attached to the associated graphics terminal
3. the phosphor type of the graphics terminal's monitor
4. the type of graphics terminal

an applications program may use the phosphor type to select a color map tuned to the monitor's characteristics 👀 — but heads up, only the std phosphor type is supported at UC Berkeley. that's the only one, periodt.

the graphics terminal type specifies the device driver a program should use when communicating with its graphics terminal. Magic supports types UCB512, AED1024, and SUN120. other programs may recognize different display types — so like, check the manual entry for your specific application for more info, iykyk 📖

a sample displays file is:

/dev/ttyi1 /dev/ttyi0 std UCB512
/dev/ttyj0 /dev/ttyj1 std UCB512
/dev/ttyjf /dev/ttyhf std UCB512
/dev/ttyhb /dev/ttyhc std UCB512
/dev/ttyhc /dev/ttyhb std UCB512 ®.in -0.5i

so in this example: /dev/ttyi1 connects to a text terminal, and an associated UCB512 graphics terminal with standard phosphor is connected to /dev/ttyi0. iconic. they found each other. 😭💖

🎀 FILES 🎀

• Magic uses the displays file ~cad/lib/displays 💾
• Gremlin looks in /usr/local/displays 👑

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• magic(1) — go read that one too bestie, it's the whole point 🌟

and that's the whole page!! this one came from the 3rd Berkeley Distribution, dated 2/19/85 (yes, 1985, we're reading vintage lore 📜), and it lives at DISPLAYS(5). mwah, love u, go configure ur terminals responsibly 💜🦋✨