
This file was taken from the September 1995 edition of the Linux Gazette.

---

Running splitvt 

Here's a great little program that I just ran across a couple days ago.  I
recently had to reinstall Linux (as well as DOS, OS/2 Warp, Win 3.1...) after
deciding to upgrade to a 850MB second HD.  I won't go into all the horrific
details, but it was a bit of a mess for a few days... 

Anyway, during the installation, as I watched the Slackware installation
dialog boxes merrily flip by... one of the utility programs caught my eye.
So, I jotted down the name of the program, and after installation was done,
tried running the thing... splitvt. 

This is a too-way-cool little program that'll let you run two shells in a
split screen fashion. "So what's so cool about that..." you ask, since you've
already told us that we've got 63 virtual terminals to choose from?  Well,
you're right, except that it lets you run two programs and watch the output
from the same screen. 

For example, if you read the manpage for it, it gives you a suggested
~/.splitvtrc run-command file that would fire up a split screen with two
login shells, and run the program top in the bottom half.  That way, you'll
have a dynamic display of your current CPU and memory usage while you merrily
work away at some task in the top screen. If you've ever used the split
screen function in the VIM editor, you'll know what I mean. 

I tried using it with a couple PPP login scripts I've been working on.  I
have one script that does auto-redial to the local university's PPP comm
server (see last month's Linux Gazette for the file) and another one, which
I recently wrote, that hangs around waiting for the /var/run/ppp0.PID file
to appear, indicating a PPP connection had been established.  Once it
finds it, it automatically updates the /etc/hosts file (since the school does
dynamic IP addressing), POP's my mail from the mail server and plunks it in
the /var/spool/mail/root file, and then starts periodically pinging the
gateway host to keep the connection up.  Running it in the split screen
let's me see what's going on with both progs as they run. 

Mucho cool. 

The beauty of this program is that it's really simple to use and set up.  The
man page is clearly written and gives an example rc file.  You can also
configure it to start up running two programs automatically, but specifying 

        run -upper first_program
        run -lower second_program

in the ~/.splitvtrc file.  I'm sure that there are some fun things that can
be done with this.

We'll see... 

---
Author: John M. Fisk (fiskjm@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu)

