Re: Terminfo settings et al
First of all: thanks for your reply - here, and to the previous post.
Much helpful. I will have to read up on terminfo, I can tell...
And test some settings. Phew...
On 07.09.2007 (10:10), Gary Johnson wrote:
> When using screen, however, the
> application is communicating with your terminal through screen, so
> while screen should sit transparently between your terminal and the
> application, screen does have to know something about the character
> sequences being used to control the terminal.
Does this mean that I could make a terminfo entry called, say,
'my-screen-in-xterm', based on that for xterm-256color, and set that
in .screenrc? That would tell screen exactly which capabilities the
terminal has, wouldn't it? But why then doesn't it work to set 'term
xterm-256color' directly?
> Also, there are some applications that are hard-coded to recognize
> certain terminal names. They may know what to do with "xterm" but
> not "xterm-256color".
Is this the reason? That mutt and mocp (and vim?) know about xterm but
not xterm-256color?
> > How much does this have to do with curses?
>
> Everything. Applications often use a curses library to interface
> with the terminal they're running in. That library uses the
> terminfo database to figure out what character sequences to send to
> the terminal in order to execute a particular curses function.
So terminfo is only relevant for applications that use ncurses?
> Things that can go wrong include:
>
> - The TERM value is incorrect for the terminal being used.
And when I run screen, what is 'the terminal being used' - is it
screen(-256color) or the terminal which screen runs in? Or both? This
is one of the things I haven't fully grasped yet: does the information
pass serially through the full chain application > ncurses > screen >
xterm > system (so that e.g. mutt will have to know about screen's
capabilities, and screen about xterm's?), or are there shortcuts?
Also: are the values simply transFERRED from one level to the next, or
are they also transLATED, so that, e.g. c-F10 is called 'apple' in
mutt and 'orange' in xterm, and ncurses knows how to translate between
them?
> - The terminfo database entry for TERM is missing, incomplete or
> otherwise doesn't contain accurate information for the terminal
> being used.
It sounds as if this is the case, then? since ...
> - The curses library used by the application is old, broken or
> otherwise doesn't allow the application access to all of the
> terminfo capabilities.
... the curses version is 5.6.20061217, and ...
> - The application uses its own idea of a terminal's capabilities
> instead of or in addition to the terminfo database.
... the problem occurs in many different applications, so unless they
all make the same assumptions, the problem should lie somewhere else,
no?
> HTH,
Very much so. Thanks again.
Eyolf
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