[TUHS] Termcap vs terminfo

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Jan 10, 2015, at 2:15 PM, David Barto <david at kdbarto.org> wrote:

> All I remember (and still support to this day) is that I’ve got a TERMCAP=‘string’ in my login scripts to set termcap to the specific terminal I’m logging in with.
> 
> Long ago this made things much faster. Today I think that it is just a holdover that I’m not changing due to inertia, rather than any real need for it.

There is still a need for this.

Most modern curses capability entries for 'xterm' and friends use the memory buffer windowing capability (a term I made up) such that when you - say - run less to display a file, it switches to a dedicated region in the terminal memory buffer while printing its output, then restores the buffer to back where you were to begin with when you exit the pager.

This drives me insane!  When I 'man foo' and find the relevant bits in the document, when I quit out of the pager I want those bits to stay on the screen so I can refer to them, dammit!  There are two shortcuts to this, both involving custom termcap/terminfo entries.

In the termcap case, you can define a $TERMCAP capability that describes an 'xterm' without the memory buffer hopping.  In the terminfo case, you tic(1) your custom 'xterm' definition into $HOME/.terminfo/...

These days - naturally - everyone knows the universe exists inside an ANSI terminal window, so who gives a fsck about term{cap.info}?  Well, I do, for this very reason.  A pox on everyone who has not 'setenv TERM aaa-48-s' !!!

--lyndon

P.S.  Terminfo entry attached for your enjoyment. (It's a text/plain. I have no idea what the hell Apple's Mail.app will do with it.)

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