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Date:      Wed, 17 Nov 1999 23:27:12 -0800
From:      "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com>
To:        Gregory Bond <gnb@itga.com.au>
Cc:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: misc/14959: incomplete xterm termcap entry (see also bug gnu/5039) 
Message-ID:  <82455.942910032@monkeys.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 18 Nov 1999 15:17:55 %2B1100. <199911180417.PAA12413@lightning.itga.com.au> 

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In message <199911180417.PAA12413@lightning.itga.com.au>, you wrote:

>The problem is a little more subtle.  The meaning of "ti" and "to" termcap
>entries make no mention of "saving the screen contents". The description of ti
>in termcap(5) is "string to start programs using cursor_address".

Yea, I noticed that, but I assumed that it was just an example of
less-than-entirely-complete documentation.

>There is no
>way in termcap to express the operation "save/restore the screen contents",

Bummer.  There obviously should be.  It _is_ a rather significant terminal
operation/capability after all.

>and
>no way to write a program (vi, more, whatever) to either use or not use this
>feature.

Bummer.  (See above.)

>Extending termcap (yet again!) with another set of tags for this
>feature is probably not feasible.

OK.  I'll bite.  Why not?

>So ugly hacks are the only option.

For the moment anyway, yes.  Definitely.

(I don't know any of the history, so I probably shouldn't comment, but...
It really does seem strange to me that such a fundamental capability never
earned its own pair of two-letter termcap abbreviations.  How about terminfo?
Are there special terminfo codes for screen save/restore?  I haven't worked
on SVR4 for quite awhile, so I can't remember.)


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