Updated terminfo and termcap descriptions for Darwin PowerPC console and AppKit Terminal.app

[Ben Sittler]

Dear Terminal Emulation Folks:

Attached to this message are terminfo sources and automatically
generated
termcap descriptions for the Darwin PowerPC Console and for the AppKit
Terminal.app, both of which are included in Apple's Mac OS X.

The termcap versions have been generated without :tc: properties, since
the broken Darwin termcap library can't really handle :tc:. Hopefully
an upcoming Darwin release will switch to ncurses or some other package
which can handle these.

These are updated versions of the descriptions I have previously sent
you. Some notable features:


nsterm (formerly Apple_Terminal)
================================

The AppKit Terminal.app descriptions all have names beginning with
"nsterm". Note that the statusline (-s) versions use the window
titlebar as a phony status line, and may produce warnings during
compilation as a result ("tsl uses 0 parameters, expected 1".) Ignore
these warnings, or even ignore these entries entirely. Apps which
need to position the cursor or do other fancy stuff inside the status
line won't work with these entries. They're primarily useful for
programs like Pine which provide simple notifications in the status
line. Please note that non-ASCII characters don't work right in the
status line, since Terminal.app incorrectly interprets their Unicode
codepoints as MacRoman codepoints.

* Renamed the AppKit Terminal.app entry from "Apple_Terminal" to
  "nsterm" to comply with the name length and case conventions and
  limitations of various software packages [notably Solaris terminfo
  and UNIX.] A single Apple_Terminal alias is retained for
  backwards-compatbility.

* Added function key support (F1-F4). These only work in Terminal.app
  version 51, hopefully the capabilities won't cause problems for people
  using version 41.

* Added "full color" (-c) entries which support the 16-color mode in
  version 51.

* By default, version 51 uses UTF-8 encoding with broken altcharset
  support, so "ASCII" (-7) entries without altcharset support were
  added.

Brief description from the "nsterm" comments:

# Apple's Mac OS X includes a Terminal.app derived from the old NeXT
# Terminal.app. It is a partial VT100 emulation with some xterm-like
# extensions. This terminfo was written to describe versions 41
# (shipped with Mac OS X version 10.0) and 51 (shipped with Mac OS X
# version 10.1) of Terminal.app.
#
# Terminal.app runs under the Mac OS X Quartz windowing system (and
# other AppKit-supported windowing systems.)  On the Mac OS X machine I
# use, the executable for Terminal.app is:
# /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal


xnuppc (formerly Darwin_Console)
================================

The Darwin PowerPC Console descriptions all have names beginning with
"xnuppc", but aliases beginning with "darwin" are provided for
convenience. Note that the x86 version of Darwin uses a different
console terminal emulation which needs to be described separately.

* Renamed the Darwin PowerPC Console entries from "Darwin_Console"
  to "xnuppc".

* Found a serious emulation glitch which causes character erasure
  when the cursor is repositioned to a cell with colors different
  from the current working colors (the "deadly red cursor" bug.)
  Partly worked around this using (msgr), but it's still a problem.

* Added "color-bold" (-b), "fancy" (-f) and "alternate fancy" (-f2)
  entries which use color combinations instead of (or in addition to)
  the terminals built-in attributes.

* Added a note on finding the Darwin console in Mac OS X version 10.1,
  where it's no longer readily obvious [at least to me.]

Brief description from the "xnuppc" comments:

# On PowerPC platforms, Apple's Darwin operating system uses a
# full-screen system console derived from a NetBSD framebuffer
# console. It is an ANSI-style terminal, and is not really VT-100
# compatible.
#
# Under Mac OS X, this is the system console driver used while in
# single-user mode [reachable by holding down Command-S during the
# boot process] and when logged in using console mode [reachable by
# typing ">console" at the graphical login prompt.]


Could these be incorporated in new releases of ncurses, termcap, and
Darwin/Mac OS X?

-Ben

nsterm.ti
Description: nsterm.ti

xnuppc.ti
Description: xnuppc.ti

nsterm.tc
Description: nsterm.tc

xnuppc.tc
Description: xnuppc.tc