Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2023 15:14:16 -0500 From: Kurt Hackenberg <kh@panix.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Cursing the tput utility - the penguin strikes again Message-ID: <Y/fJGCedB3Fk17xa@rain.cave> In-Reply-To: <974a81c2-a92d-7f94-5f96-869bddfe21f3@fjl.co.uk> References: <974a81c2-a92d-7f94-5f96-869bddfe21f3@fjl.co.uk>
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On Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 04:45:21PM +0000, Frank Leonhardt wrote: >So there's a tput utility for controlling the terminal in BSD. ... >Well use the tcap utility on non-BSD platforms and it suddenly doesn't >work. It turns out that the penguinistas thought using the "Cap Name" >instead of the "TCap Code" was a good idea. Some of the codes are the >same, some are not. In fact most are not. The trouble is those are two different mechanisms, based on two different file formats, that do the same thing. The two file formats are "termcap" and "terminfo", both from the default names of the system files that use them. Manual section 5 has pages about both. They're similar, but different enough to be incompatible. The "TCap codes" are the names used in termcap format; the "Capnames" are the names used in terminfo format. (A "cap" is a terminal "capability".) I think termcap came first, and then somebody invented terminfo as an improvement or a reimplementation of the same idea. I think termcap came from Berkeley Unix -- maybe invented for vi -- so FreeBSD more or less stayed with it. Maybe terminfo came from Bell Labs; I think Linux prefers it. This is pointlessly incompatible, the result of haphazard evolution, and kind of a mess. It's all about 40 years old. The library functions that use those terminal descriptions were in the library "curses" (from "cursor"), long ago superseded by "ncurses" (new curses). Probably the program tput uses the library ncurses. You might want to look at that library; maybe there's a compatibility layer. Or, as Daniel Tameling suggested, maybe there are two different version of ncurses.
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