Michael Zucchi: Terminal Emulation docs

[Todd Larason <jtl-gnome molehill org>]

Apologies for sending this to the whole list; the contact address in the
docs bounces withi an MX error.

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in Zvt's BUGS file, you say:

    A whole bunch of terminal emulation is not implemented - where
    do you get docs on this stuff? (Most of what has been written
    was reverse engineered from a Termcap entry).

If you're still looking for answers, read on...

The 'official' place for ANSI-style terminal definitions is now ECMA-48.
It's apparently now available online (finally) at
ftp://ftp.ecma.ch/ecma-st/e048-pdf.pdf, or you can order a free hardcopy
or CD-ROM copy by writing to documents@ecma.ch.  When I got my copy, it
took about 2 months to arrive, airmail to the US from Switzerland.  ECMA
has related standards covering things such as character sets as well.

That standard includes quite a bit more than is in actual use, and there
are some useful and widely-used facilities that aren't actually 
standardized.  rxvt.ref and xterm.seq, both packaged with rxvt, do a
decent job documenting what rxvt and xterm implement, respectively.

I'm including my notes about what the linux 1.2.1 console implemented,
in case that's helpful.  Anything referring to 'jtl attributes',
standout mode, and the status line should be ignored - those were private
extensions that never got into the real kernel.

And finally, if you aren't aware of the Shuford archive, you might want
to look around there some - 
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal_index.html .