The notes below were written by Lars Doelle, one of the maintainers of
the Konsole terminal emulation package for KDE.  This was in response
to "[Bug 127285] Honor VT100 Remote Printing Sequences".  The "remote
host executing local functions" topic that he refers to was a posting I
made to the Konsole-devel list about getting this Linux desktop
terminal emulation package to support features like the Windows-based
AccuTerm product that is one of the "killer-apps" in the MV market.

The ptytunnel program described here is provided as a courtesy by
Nebula R&D for the MultiValue community.  Please send comments to
Tony if they relate to MV or directly to the author about the code
itself.

The software itself is provided in ptytunnel-1.0.tgz.

Tony - May 23, 2006
freeware@nebula-rnd.com

From Lars:

As the issue of multiplexing the terminal lines comes up time and
again in various forms, attached an explicit proposal how to cope
with it.

We had another such a case on the list last year under the topic
"Remote host executing local functions", for instance, other applications
were embedded devices (e.g. cash registers or pda-like devices in
a store) with a konsole plus some machinery to be controlled or
issuing data to be kept separately from keyboard input all over the
same terminal line, to present some examples. These are all valid,
though very particular uses of the konsole.

Now remote printing is indeed part of the VT* specification, but falls
into the same category, i believe. Note that the Linux console for
instance does not implement it, either, perhaps for likely reasons.

My suggestion is so not to add support for such tunnels to the stock
konsole core, but to keep it instead in a separate program. This has
many advantages, among them:

1) The extensions can be localised.
2) The extensions can be used with any terminal.
3) Private variations of such extensions are more easy
    to make than within the full konsole source.
4) The approach can be used for the complete class of
    such extensions.
5) Keeping such extensions separate, they are not critical
    with respect to the default configuration, as the program
    has to be called separately and is not present in any
    konsole session by default.

The attached ptytunnel does the remote printing, and should
otherwise serve both as an example and a prove of concept.

Please see the manual page in the attached tar ball for more
information.

-lars