Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 22:02:24 +1000 (EST) From: Rick Marshall <rjm@nlc.net.au> To: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@ki.net> Cc: Ncurses Mailing List <ncurses-list@netcom.com>, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: termcap/curses vs ncurses Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.960424213756.32652A-100000@nhj.nlc.net.au> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.92.960408141213.21256H-100000@freebsd.ki.net>
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OK if there's one thing I hate it's religious arguments and this whole terminfo/termcap thing is definitely one of those. I have picked a message at random from the hoard of message to reply through not because I thought it was better or worse, or more or less appropriate than the others. Enough of the crap. I've been doing curses things for however long its been around and maintain a major screen based thing that does lots of hairy terminal window stuff. Here's my reasons for doing things: Switched from termcap to terminfo so I could stop decoding function keys. If termcap does it now that's great, but eons ago fkeys were a pain in the neck and terminfo did it for me. The post polish strings for sgr, csr and their cousins are great if you know how to use a stack machine. The speed of terminfo is good partly because of the small files that don't don't have to be searched, but mostly because un*x caches inodes and blocks so lots of times there is no disk access to get terminal descriptions. BTW, specially for esr, don't beat up the termcap people too much or I won't have a big enough file to cat to the console while I try to work out which way the turbo switch goes. Terminfo printer stuff in conjunction with Sys V lp works really well too. I have ported terminfo code to SysV3&4, HP/Ux, SUNOs, Solaris, Linux, DEC Unix, SCO :-), AIX,, .... with minimal problems. The worst was getting AIX box stuff working. Anyone interested? And finally I do use mc4/mc5 in production environments for print through and it does work. If anyone's interested I'll share the secrets. Now can we get onto something really important to all of us who use modems to maintain sites where full screen operation is normal and get support for the repeat character sequence in the ncurses screen update optimiser and sort out what attributes the screen has after a clear screen. email rjm@nlc.net.au WWW http://www.nlc.net.au/~rjm/
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