Re: curses vs. xterm key mismatch

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Will Parsons wrote:

> I'm working on a curses application that is supposed to react to an End
> key, but this does not seem to be recognized in a xterm under FreeBSD 6.1.
> Investigation shows that when I press either of the End keys, what curses
> sees is 0601, which seems to be defined as KEY_SELECT in curses.h.  (There
> is no problem running under a real console.)  Is this an xterm issue, a
> terminfo issue on FreeBSD, or something else, and what is the best/proper

It's a limitation of the way any version of curses works.

They use the first keycode in their table which is assigned to a given 
string.  Since xterm is emulating a vt100/vt220, that means it's thinking
of KEY_SELECT rather than the PC-style Home/End.  You can switch the
terminal description and get a different behavior.

A quick check shows I'm using the PC-style in xterm's terminfo.
Ditto for ncurses.  FreeBSD has its own termcap (though I recall
its xterm entries being modified to match ncurses a couple of years
ago).  But it could be either flavor - or both.  At one point both
definitions were in the terminal description, but since curses uses
only one, I removed the one that was less useful.  If your terminal
description has both, curses will use the first one in the table,
(looks like KEY_HOME would override...)

> way of handling this?  (Obviously, I can have my program simply look for
> KEY_SELECT in addition to KEY_END, but this doesn't seem right to me.)
>
> The value of TERM is xterm.
>
> - Will
>
>
>
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Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net