From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jul 10 13:23:24 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D251837B400 for ; Wed, 10 Jul 2002 13:23:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from harrier.mail.pas.earthlink.net (harrier.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.12]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 653DC43E4A for ; Wed, 10 Jul 2002 13:23:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert2@mindspring.com) Received: from pool0451.cvx22-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net ([209.179.199.196] helo=mindspring.com) by harrier.mail.pas.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 17SNzN-0001d8-00; Wed, 10 Jul 2002 13:23:05 -0700 Message-ID: <3D2C977E.F4EC2346@mindspring.com> Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 13:22:22 -0700 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Sony} (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Alex Dupre Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: terminfo/termcap and cygwin References: <55271305897.20020710154832@alexdupre.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Alex Dupre wrote: > In normal situation accessing to a FreeBSD 4.x machine from cygwin is not > very pleasant: editing files is quite a pain, there are many terminal > "glitches" like the cursor in the wrong position and garbage text. Sounds like Cygwin's terminal program fails to correctly implement the ANSI 3.64 standard. Could you use an ANSI 3.64 standard terminal, instead? Windows Telnet is standards compliant, for example. > I read that FreeBSD uses termcap rather than terminfo, but either the > included cygwin entry or the terminfo-generated one don't work correctly. So > the binary terminfo seems to be the only solution (and termcap seems to be > not so powerful). Termcap is more powerful. The author of terminfo, Bill Joy, has stated this in interviews: you can arbitrarily add attributes to termcap without having to recompile all your applications. With terminfo, since it stores raw structure images, adding a field changes the structure size, and potentially the order of the elements, and therefore you must recompile everything that uses it, if you add a field. The primary design goals of terminfo were: o Abuse the FS as a database to facilitate fast lookups using the system FS directory structure, rather than an ordered search for a newline followed by a non-whitespace character listing alternate values seperated by the pipe ('|') symbol up to the first colon (':') symbol. o Keep users from screwing up the database, because the average user does not understand how to write proper terminal descriptions, by reserving the avility to add/edit such descriptions to the vendor. > My question is: should terminfo database be installed (manually or by > make/installworld) or is there a better fix? "No" and "Yes", answered in the order asked. The ultimate fix is to have your terminal program comply with the standards. Failing that, you need to write a correct entry. I'm going to guess that either a cursor movement optimization is triggering a bug in the emulator state machine, or you aren't setting the autowrap/automargin attribute correctly in the termcap entry. These are the most common termcap errors. Actually, if you do a search for: termcap entry test program You should be able to quickly identify what's wrong with your termcap entry, or if it's actually another Cygwin bug. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message