Re: Terminal answers

[Anton Monroe <akm meer net>]

Thanks, Thomas.  I was hoping the Terminfo expert was reading.

On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 03:42:29PM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> >  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).

I'll change it to something like "Slang and Ncurses sometimes use
different capabilities of the terminal, so you may be able to work
around a broken terminfo entry by using a different library".

Hmm.  Something I've noticed in Ncurses-based apps is that blank areas
don't erase text.  For example, in Pinfo, when I page down, some of the
previous screen still shows in the blank areas.  It's probably a common
problem with a simple explanation.  Some capability that needs to be
set or unset in my terminfo entry?

Anton