Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2014 06:59:39 -0500 From: Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com> To: Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl> Cc: arch@freebsd.org, Bryan Drewery <bdrewery@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: terminfo Message-ID: <20140223115939.GB4084@aerie.jexium-island.net> In-Reply-To: <CAJOYFBCMS4k7pyRk2YHZm81F6iP=SApZhbCm0MO4P-pvXbTCxQ@mail.gmail.com> References: <5304A0CC.5000505@FreeBSD.org> <CAJOYFBCMS4k7pyRk2YHZm81F6iP=SApZhbCm0MO4P-pvXbTCxQ@mail.gmail.com>
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--DBIVS5p969aUjpLe Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 01:05:52PM +0100, Ed Schouten wrote: > Hi Bryan, >=20 > On 19 February 2014 13:17, Bryan Drewery <bdrewery@freebsd.org> wrote: > > Why do we not use terminfo? Our termcap is quite aged and missing a lot > > of modern terminals/clients. >=20 > It is true that our termcap is quite aged, but the fact is, once you > add entries for a certain terminal, there's little need to update it > after that. ncurses itself is not really a moving target. What kind of > modern terminals/clients are missing? hmm - I continue to add/improve the database (and always have todo's) http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src-history.html > > Using terminfo would allow us to use the already well maintained databa= se from ncurses. Is it just a matter of someone doing the work or are there= other reasons? >=20 > It's just a matter of someone doing the work. It would be nice if we > ever made this change. It's more than that - there's some reluctance of the users to switch to terminfo. So what FreeBSD has is a facade wrapped around terminfo, with the legacy termcap database updated occasionally. =20 > I won't deny that termcap was really useful at one point in time, but > let's be honest: the variety of terminals out there has massively > dropped over time. Terminal emulation has become a solved problem. As > of FreeBSD 9, syscons supports all the sequences described in > xterm-256color, though it isn't able to print more than 8 colours, I'm inclined to disagree with that. Here's a working entry for the console, along with notes: http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-teken (though I see that I overlooked adding the note which I made for wsvt25, that none of the xterm-specific items is supported). Counting differences using infocmp: versus cons25 (37 lines) versus xterm-new (120 lines) One of the differences against cons25 is partial, as noted in my comments on acsc - there's no corresponding adjustment to make against xterm. > which is why we use TERM=3Dxterm. Tools like screen, tmux, etc., they > use a different TERM type, but this is mainly used to detect whether > the process is running inside of screen or tmux. It does not strongly > affect the kinds of sequences that are being emitted. They work > perfectly fine if you just set TERM to xterm or xterm-256color. >=20 > I suspect the following logic would be sufficient for at least 99.5% > of our users: >=20 > if $TERM contains 256 > use xterm-256color > else > use xterm I didn't see any 256-color support in testing this configuration. It does _something_, but would tend to disappoint users. ftp://invisible-island.net/temp/teken-88colors.png ftp://invisible-island.net/temp/teken-256colors.png (screenshots made using VMware Fusion with FreeBSD 10 - ymmv) =20 > It's a shame I am so short on time nowadays, but I think it would make > so much sense to just come up with some kind of document that > standardizes the intersection of the features supported by most common > terminal emulators and get it rubber stamped by the maintainers of > various terminal emulators. If it turns out some kind of terminal > emulator does something in a non-standard way, we can just slap this > document in the author's face. That would not only benefit FreeBSD, > but also most of the other flavours of UNIX. >=20 > $TERM should die. certainly not while there are such large differences among the implementati= ons. :-) --=20 Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net> http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net --DBIVS5p969aUjpLe Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: Digital signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlMJ4qsACgkQcCNT4PfkjtuhgQCdFvrZJbPSj1B0oqTdtWb6RyXb kYEAniEYpH45cNdgLPQI3bB8RuvaNpXp =adgk -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --DBIVS5p969aUjpLe--
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