Re: curses vs. xterm key mismatch

[Will Parsons]

Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Will Parsons wrote:
> 
>> "switch the terminal description" - is this something specific to FreeBSD
>> that I would have to ask on a FreeBSD newsgroup?
> 
> no, I just meant to either use a different setting for $TERM (simple),
> or to use a new termcap/terminfo (complex).

I've been playing with different values for TERM without success...
According to a comment in the termcap file, it *sounds* like the correct
setting might be to set TERM to xterm-xfree86 and set the resource
XTerm*sunKeyboard to true, but although this changes the behaviour of the
End key, it does give me the correct mapping.  Perhaps I need to create a
modified a xterm entry that does what I want?

>>> 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...)
>>>
>> I'm still unsure of what I should be doing - complaining to FreeBSD that
>> something is wrong with their termcap/terminfo, making some sort of
>> adjustment in my environment, or simply accepting that KEY_SELECT may do
>> the same as KEY_END and allowing for that in my application?
> 
> Perhaps both.
> 
> At the moment I'm looking at the FreeBSD termcap, which appears to be 
> using for "xterm" the entries that I had updated for XFree86 in 2001. 
> That was imported into FreeBSD in 2002/08/27.
> 
> That particular file is hand-maintained, though I generate a termcap.src 
> from ncurses' terminfo.src periodically.  Checking now, I see that xterm's 
> termcap file still uses Select as well as End (does not cancel one in 
> favor of the other, but just adds them both).  But the intent of that file 
> is not to support curses applications, just low-level termcap applications 
> (though that's what FreeBSD used it for ;-).
> 
> For terminfo, I canceled the conflicting keys from the descriptions
> a while back (and those are PC-style, with a comment in the terminfo
> file indicating how to change the entries to vt220-style).
> 
> So - using the termcap entry for curses means you'll get one set of
> keycodes, but using the terminfo entry means you'll get a different set.
> 
But this is nothing I can choose, is it?  (Short of rebuilding ncurses,
which I don't think I want to do.)  My understanding is that applications
are built to use one or the other, with newer applications using terminfo
instead of termcap.

- Will