Re: Fixing xterm terminfos

[Thomas Dickey]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Mike Sharov wrote:

> Dear terminfo maintainer,
>
> The key sequences for xterm, rxvt, and xterm-color are currently
> incorrect in the terminfo.src definition. I am using the xterm that
> comes with Xorg 6.9.0 and F1-F4, Home, End, KP Center, and the arrow

6.9 is rather old - and in any case, it only bundles a particular
version of xterm.  The terminfo bundled with xterm "always" (barring
bugs) matches xterm.  ncurses's default "xterm" entry depends on how
it is installed (it's matched "xterm-new" for the past year or two,
and "xterm-new" should match current xterm).

> keys are not correctly defined. The correct values are "\033OP" -
> "\033OS", "\033[H", "\033[F", "\033[E", and 033[D,\033[A,\033[B,\033[C.
> xterm-color does not have these values either.

xterm-color is a generic entry which does not correspond to any particular
terminal emulator.  (This is true even for Mac OS X, whose maintainers
set $TERM to xterm-color even though there are more suitable entries in 
terminfo.src).

> rxvt definition is correct for the most keys except the keypad, where
> arrows generate different codes than the non-keypad ones. However, rxvt
> does not by default set TERM to rxvt (Rxvt v2.7.10), probably because
> the rxvt terminfo does not specify the correct color sequences, which
> should be the same as the ones in xterm and xterm-color.

no - the reason for rxvt doing that is because the developers chose not
to make the terminal description part of their install (like PuTTY - which
also doesn't match xterm ;-)

> I am wondering what, if anything, can be done about these problems. Were
> the current values valid at some point? Is your policy to maintain them
> for backward compatibility (with what?), or should they be updated to
> reflect the current software's behavior?
> --
> Mike Sharov
> address@hidden
>
>
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> Bug-ncurses mailing list
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> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ncurses

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