[aklug] Re: terminal types and curses programming

On Sat, 24 Jan 2009, Christopher Howard wrote:

> Thanks for the help everyone. Question: Do you guys know if there is an
> official list somewhere of the various terminal types and their
> descriptions/capabilities? I suppose I could just research every one in my
> terminfo directory individually, but it would be more convenient if
> someone had already done that. =] My awesome googling powers don't seem to
> be pulling anything up.

Why? The whole point of terminfo/termcap is that you don't have to know the
various types in advanced, you just query the capabilities on the fly. For
some things (like extended ASCII graphical characters) Curses is supposed to
substitute nearest approximates on the fly if the terminal doesn't support
them.

On top of that, you also need to realize that just having terminfo/termcap
available doesn't mean you have the full library of types available -- you
can selectively trim them as desired to save disk space. I wouldn't be
surprised if many distros did just that with some of the more esoteric
and/or extreme legacy devices.

If you're going to go there, you're kind of bypassing the benefits of an
abstraction layer like Curses. However, if it's that important, O'Reilly
did have an excellent book on Terminfo/Termcap. I don't know if it's still
in print, but I do have a copy of it.

I realize that that this doesn't answer your question, but to get that
you're going to end up delving into the deeper recesses of terminfo and
termcap itself.

BTW: for the rest of the mildly interested bystanders of this thread, one of
the things that (n)Curses does is provide a terminfo capability, it's not a
separate package.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Sat Jan 24 13:01:09 2009