Hello Mystic Gurus!

I'm working on making widescreen versions of the mystic message base reading screens. I've got everything looking pretty/functioning pretty great at 132x36!

But, I'm stuck trying to figure out what to do with the Message Base
Listing screen - the screen that displays all the message listings for any selected message area.

I've changed the PROMPT (399) that outputs the message information so it uses a (pipe)DF and moved the exact PROMPT line into that asc template:

\12\&5\07\$L06\&1 \$R29\&2 \$R15\&3 \$R15\&4 \$R08\&6

(backslashes/strokes are actually pipes)

It almost works! I'm able to configure the line based on the screen width as I hoped. BUT, for some reason it outputs an empty line between each message.

So my question: How do I surpress this extra line? I'm not sure where it's coming from. There's only a single line in my .asc file, and the prompt has nothing except the DF code.

If you want to see what I mean, login to bbs.mynameisgabe.com with a screen size of 132x36 or larger. Go to the message bases and drill down into one of the echomail areas with a lot of messages.

Any guidance would be much appreciated!

Grim

... "No comment" is a comment.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/01/27 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: The Dark Side (21:3/234)

On 03 Mar 2026, GRiM said the following...

Hello Mystic Gurus!

So my question: How do I surpress this extra line? I'm not sure where it's coming from. There's only a single line in my .asc file, and the prompt has nothing except the DF code.

So I answered part of my question - the .ASC file has a newline character (\n) at EOF - even though there's only a single line when editing it in VIM. I can use the linux command `tr -d '\n' < input.asc > output.asc` to strip out that character and it works!

Is there a way to strip this out using display codes? Seems like there should be an option.

GRiM

... The person who snores the loudest will fall asleep first

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/01/27 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: The Dark Side (21:3/234)

So I answered part of my question - the .ASC file has a newline
character (\n) at EOF - even though there's only a single line when editing it in VIM. I can use the linux command `tr -d '\n' < input.asc > output.asc` to strip out that character and it works!

Have you tried Mystic's ANSI editor? It'll work for both .ans and .asc files.

|11ogg
|11SysOp, Altair IV BBS
|11altairiv.ddns.net:2323

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Altair IV BBS (altairiv.ddns.net:2323) (21:2/147)

On 03 Mar 2026, ogg said the following...

Have you tried Mystic's ANSI editor? It'll work for both .ans and .asc files.

Yah, I've had some trouble with the Mystic ANSI editor stripping out random display codes and making it's own mess with ASCII files. Could definitely be user-error so I'll keep playing with it. I've definitely used it many times to trim the NEWLINE off ansi.

I was hoping for some sort of display code that would function like a lot of frameworks "trim" function - that would remove whitespace from the end/beginnings of data or dump out of the current file before the end like a "break".

Unix/linux likes newlines at the end of text files. It seems like there'd be a more elegant way of handling that rather than using an ansi editor or running a utility script. But maybe not.

Thanks for the tip!

-grim

... Some people have no idea what they're doing, and are really good at it!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2023/01/27 (Raspberry Pi/32)
* Origin: The Dark Side (21:3/234)