Re: Terminal answers

[Thomas Dickey <dickey his com>]

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Anton Monroe wrote:

>   3) You could try compiling MC with a different screen library. You
>   have a choice of using the Slang library that comes with MC, or the
>   version of Slang that is (probably) already on your computer, or the
>   version of Ncurses that is (probably) already on your computer. Slang
>   is reputedly better at dealing with broken terminfo entries than
>   Ncurses, and MC uses Slang by default.  But I suppose Ncurses might
>   be better in some circumstances.

That's because

        a) slang used to supply hardcoded defaults to match rxvt if some
           information was missing (actually there were also some
           hardcoded defaults for a few other terminals, but rxvt was the
           target).  Most of that was removed early in the 1.4.x series.

        b) slang doesn't use some capabilities that ncurses does (this
           is especially noticeable in the way it clears trailing blanks
           on a line).

>   That was my situation. My SSH client for OS/2 claims to provide a
>   "substantial subset" of the xterm-color terminal.  It doesn't say
>   which version of xterm-color. I doubt if even the various Linux
>   distributions all provide exactly the same terminfo files.  None of

that's true (I haven't found much use in the distributions' 
customizations)

> Some tips, in no particular order:
>
>   The escape character is often represented by "^[", but Terminfo
>   entries use "\E" and MC uses "\e".

tic recognizes either case

>   Each terminfo capability has a short name and a long name that is
>   easier to understand.  Unfortunately, 'tack' and 'tput' only use the
>   short forms.  Keep a list handy for reference.

I hadn't noticed that (to-do list...)

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net