Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2014 05:15:06 +1100 (EST) From: Bruce Evans <brde@optusnet.com.au> To: Ian Lepore <ian@freebsd.org> Cc: Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl>, Bryan Drewery <bdrewery@freebsd.org>, arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: terminfo Message-ID: <20140222030504.D3166@besplex.bde.org> In-Reply-To: <1392997589.1145.91.camel@revolution.hippie.lan> References: <5304A0CC.5000505@FreeBSD.org> <CAJOYFBCMS4k7pyRk2YHZm81F6iP=SApZhbCm0MO4P-pvXbTCxQ@mail.gmail.com> <1392997589.1145.91.camel@revolution.hippie.lan>
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On Fri, 21 Feb 2014, Ian Lepore wrote: > On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 13:05 +0100, Ed Schouten wrote: >> Hi Bryan, >> >> 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. Why do we not use Windows? :-) >> 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? I tend to agree. I used to have several special termcap entries in .profile or .termcap because the system termcap was unreliable. Now after using mainly syscons for 20+ years, I have only 1 special termcap entry (a prefix to cons25) in .profile (to partly recover from breakage of some syscons escape sequences). >> ... >> 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, >> which is why we use TERM=xterm. Tools like screen, tmux, etc., they >> >> I suspect the following logic would be sufficient for at least 99.5% >> of our users: >> >> if $TERM contains 256 >> use xterm-256color >> else >> use xterm >> ... >> $TERM should die. > > All of that seems to assume that every terminal actually being used in > the world today is either xterm or something that emulates it. Try > using vi on a serial console on an embedded ARM board and you'll get a > quick frustrating lesson in how not-xterm a serial console is. I've yet > to find a combo of serial comms program and TERM setting that actually > works well and lets you edit a file with vi. What display device is the ARM board connected to that causes a problem? I use an intentionally simple terminal program that does no translation, and haven't noticed many problems. Even tip/cu should work similarly. TERM/TERMCAP/.termcap are just the host's values for non-serial terminal activity. These must be copied to all targets. This only works for hosts and targets that are Unix-like OSes which support TERM/TERMCAP/.termcap of course. The display hardware and the software that controls it is on the PC so its escape sequences can be anything I want. Bruce
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