Re: Line mode

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Mike Aubury wrote:

>
> If I run a program with TERM=vt100 and have some display in screen mode, then
> switch to line mode, the screen mode display is scrolled up and my line mode
> display is put at the bottom..
>
> If I run the same program with TERM=xterm, the screen mode display disappears
> and is replaced by a copy of the screen *before* the screen mode was
> initiated and the display is put at the bottom.
>
> What terminfo/termcap setting is used to specify this latter behaviour ?
> (And is there anyway to turn it off - so I get the display like TERM=vt100
> when using xterm without having to change the terminfo/termcap entry!)

That's the xterm alternate screen feature.  It is not explicitly part of
terminfo/termcap, but by convention is part of the smcup/rmcup (ti/te)
strings.  Most terminals (other than xterm and rxvt) don't have this
feature.

For ncurses (and possibly other terminfo-based curses implementations),
it's possible to modify the in-memory copy of the terminfo after calling
initscr() or newterm().  I do this in dialog to suppress screen flicker
when running several instances of the executable.  Otherwise (other than
selecting a $TERM which doesn't have this feature), I don't know of a
standard way to suppress it.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net