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#ident "%Z%%M% %I% %E% SMI" SVr4.0 1.6

# From: SVr4.0 terminfo:README 1.6

1 Within the curses component, exists other conversion tools which are

much more robust than those described below. They are called infocmp,

and captoinfo. The cvt files are provided here only for those possible

cases where a user has the terminfo component without the libcurses

component.

The captoinfo and infocmp utilities cannot be included here, as they

require the user to have libcurses. Although we know of no instance

when a user would have one and not the other, we have provided the

cvt files (described below) for those limited cases.

2 The files in this directory with the .ti suffix are terminfo sources.

They should be compiled (separately or by catting them together into

terminfo.src) with tic, placing the results in /usr/lib/terminfo.

Please send any updates to AT&T Bell Laboratories UNIX support,

via UNIX mail to attunix!terminfo.

3 The cvt files are useful tools for converting termcap to terminfo.

They are not 100% accurate, but do most of the conversion for you.

cvt.ex is an ex script to convert a termcap description into a

terminfo description. Note that it will not convert padding

specifications, so they must be done by hand. Note also that typical

termcap entries do not give as much information as terminfo, so the

resulting terminfo entry is often incomplete (e.g. won't tell you the

terminal uses xon/xoff handshaking, or what extra function keys send).

You are urged to read the list of terminfo capabilities and augment your

terminfo descriptions accordingly.

The cvt.h file is useful for a quick hack at converting termcap programs

which use uppercase 2 letter names for capabilities to use terminfo.

Since tget* are provided anyway, this is of questionable value unless

your program barely fits on a pdp-11.

The cvt.sed script is useful for actually editing the source of the same

class of programs. It requires a sed that understands \< and \>, the

mod is trivial to make if you look at the corresponding code in ex or

grep.

3 There are other incompatibilities at the user level between termcap and

terminfo. A program which creates a termcap description and then

passes it to tgetent (e.g. vi used to do this if no TERM was set) or

which puts such a description in the environment for a child cannot

possibly work, since terminfo puts the parser into the compiler, not

the user program. If you want to give a child a smaller window, set

up the LINES and COLUMNS environment variables or implement the JWINSIZE

ioctl.

4 If you want to edit your own personal terminfo descriptions (and are not

a super user on your system) the method is different. Set

TERMINFO=$HOME/term (or wherever you put the compiled tree) in your

environment, then compile your source with tic. Tic and user programs

will check in $TERMINFO before looking in /usr/lib/terminfo/*/*

5 Philosophy in adding new terminfo capabilities:

Capabilities were cheap in termcap, since no code supported them

and they need only be documented. In terminfo, they add size to

the structure and the binaries, so don't add them in mass quantities.

Add a capability only if there is an application that wants to use it.

Lots of terminals have a half duplex forms editing mode, but no UNIX

applications use it, so we don't include it.

Before you add a capability, try to hold off until there are at least

2 or 3 different terminals implementing similar features. That way,

you can get a better idea of the general model that the capability

should have, rather than coming up with something that only works

on one kind of terminal. For example, the status line capabilities

were added after we had seen the h19, the tvi950, and the vt100 run

sysline. The original program, called h19sys, only worked on an h19

and addressed the cursor to line 25. This model doesn't fit other

terminals with a status line.

Note that capabilities must be added at the end of ../screen/caps.

Furthermore, if you add a private capability, you should check with

someone to make sure your capability goes into the master file,

otherwise someone else will add a different capability and

compatibility between two systems is destroyed. There must be one

master set of capabilities. This list is maintained at AT&T UNIX

Development. Comments should be sent to attunix!terminfo.

6 Current murky areas include:

Color - there is demand for colors but it isn't clear what to do yet.

Some terminals support only 2 or 4 or 8 or 16 colors, others have a

palette of some huge selection. What are the standard colors? How

does graphics fit into this (terminfo is alphanumeric oriented?)

Curses can have another 16 bits added, or some routine set to decide

which 9 attribute bits have meaning in any given program. An

alternative is that if you just want color alphanumerics for a simple

application, e.g. highlighting certain fields, decide how you would

want your application to behave on a B/W terminal (e.g. a vt100),

using reverse for one thing, blinking for another, bold for another,

invisible for another, etc.

(Invis may be useful for colored fields with no information in them.)

Then make a terminfo entry with blink=xxx, bold=yyy, etc, where xxx

and yyy are sequences to go into the colors you really want. This way

your application also works on B/W terminals.

Graphics: Giles Billingsley at Berkeley did something called MFBCAP

once, it was like termcap but 3 times as big and handled graphics.

I don't think it was ever finished. I don't know how to do graphics

in curses, one might add it to terminfo at very high cost.

Input: things that send escape sequences to your program to be decoded

are a hard issue. You have to somehow deal with typeahead and with

terminals that can't do it. This includes "request cursor position",

for which a better solution is to immediately address the cursor to

a known position. (Curses also has filter mode that won't assume

the line but will assume the column.) Mice also fall into this

category. Scanf style strings (tparm is printf style) might be able

to decode these sequences, but I have no experience with them.

Alternate character set: the vt100 set seems to be becoming a defacto

standard, although it doesn't do much. I almost standardized on the

Teletype 5410, which was a nice superset of the vt100, but then Teletype

updated the 5410 to make it a vt100 duplicate, so now all I've put in

are the vt100 line drawing characters. HP has a more complete set,

but it has some really weird things in it and the mappings are

nonstandard.

Any extension should be able to handle both kinds of terminals, and

handle common programs without assuming an HP (or even a vt100).

------------------------------------

7 Additional modules:

ckout shell script, analyzes file errs for diagnostics

and displays number of entries built

Doc.sed sed script to be run on ti files.

prints documentation of ti files.