I am one of those very long-in-the-tooth users of SYSREQ 1 to flip
between two sessions in a single emulator window. Got very used to it,
muscle memory and all that. And it was close to essential back in the
day, when I was using an actual terminal that looked something like
this:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f0/e9/9f/f0e99f1a60a7d09c592979aae9fbc0c0.jpg
It was by far the most convenient (if not only) way to have two
sessions open at the same time. Back then.
Well, I am now finally making a genuine effort to change my workflow
to make use of the relatively new tabs feature of the ACS emulator.
This is much better than SYSREQ 1 for probably a lot of reasons, but
the single biggest one for me is that all of them can be active
concurrently.
Lately I have been running into issues with the SYSREQ 1 arrangement
because whichever one is not being displayed is suspended. Which means
it gets no CPU time at all. Which, crucially, means it cannot release
any locks.
Back in the day, that wasn't a big problem for me. I got used to
making sure one session wasn't locking anything needed by the other
session before switching over. It was relatively straightforward then,
because I was only dealing with old-school means of working with
files, and RCLRSC was sufficient to release anything that an errant
program was holding onto. Now, with SQL keeping cursors dormant but
open even after you've explicitly closed them, it's not always so
straightforward. (See my other thread on releasing member locks.) With
multiple sessions independently active in tabs, "pseudo-closed"
cursors can be released without muss or fuss.
And having them in tabs in a single window is a bit nicer than each in
its own window because it's easier to navigate and organize sessions
in the SYSREQ 1 style. For example, if you're connected to three
different systems, each with two sessions; you can have three windows,
each with two easily switchable tabs, rather than six independent
windows.
If you're already using the tabs feature, thank you for indulging my
braindump. If you're using strictly one session per window and are
happy with that, wonderful. If you're still using SYSREQ 1, hopefully
I've exposed you to something that can improve your workflow.
John Y.
midrange.com
