Re: Alternate character set for line-drawing

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> I know that there is an option (-a) of MC which enables alternate
> character set for line-drawing. This doesn't seem the case when MC is
> compiled with ncurses support. I understand that there should be a way
> to switch this by passing a control sequnce to the terminal so maybe
> this is why there is not such an option for ncurses MC. From reading a
> termcap entry for linux it seems like this is control+N. But MC
> interprets control+N for its own purposes.

The difference between ncurses and S-Lang is that ncurses provides less
hooks to override terminfo settings.  S-Lang gives you
SLtt_Has_Alt_Charset.

> If I'm not going in the wrong way (I dont have all the necessary
> knowldege on the topic), is there a way to switch to alternate
> character set without additional coding ?

Yes, if you want to do it completely without coding, you can dump the 
terminfo entry for your terminal by "infocmp", then remove capabilities 
"acsc", "enacs", "rmacs" and "smacs" and recompile the entry by tic.

An approach with very little coding would be to fill acs_map with 
ASCII approximations.  I'm a bit unsure if it's safe to write into acs_map 
on all operating systems with all reasonably new versions of ncurses.

It is also possible to extend the existing code from the PC port (look for 
acs2pc_table) to use out own map, but it would require massive changes.

I think I'll rewrite acs_map and enable "-a" for ncurses.  Users will find
out if it works for them.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin