DIARY: terminfo is a database of terminal capabilities


$cd /lib/terminfo/
$ls
a  c  d  E  h  l  m  p  r  s  v  w  x
$pwd
/lib/terminfo
$cd l/
$infocmp linux
$infocmp linux 
#       Reconstructed via infocmp from file: /lib/terminfo/l/linux
linux|linux console,
        am, bce, ccc, eo, mir, msgr, xenl, xon,
        colors#8, it#8, ncv#18, pairs#64,

Terminfo (formerly Termcap) is a database of terminal capabilities and more. For every (well almost) model of terminal it tells application programs what the terminal is capable of doing. It tells what escape sequences (or control characters) to send to the terminal in order to do things such as move the cursor to a new location, erase part of the screen, scroll the screen, change modes, change appearance (colors, brightness, blinking, underlining, reverse video etc.). After about 1980, many terminals supported over a hundred different commands (some of which take numeric parameters).


grepping through ncurses sources.
$grep terminfo  infocmp.c
 * terminfo entries, completely determine the actions of the program.
static ENTRY *entries;          /* terminfo entries */

$grep ENTRY dump_entry.h
#ifndef DUMP_ENTRY_H
#define DUMP_ENTRY_H 1
#endif /* DUMP_ENTRY_H */
$

Friday, May 14, 2010

terminfo is a database of terminal capabilities