Re: infocmp posible bug

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Peter,

At 2025-01-11T13:17:26+0100, Peter Radisson wrote:
> i was a bit fustrated by the lack of documentation regarding the
> possibilites of tput (or the terminals). When you google that topic
> only a few caps regarding colors are discussed, most times people are
> unaware of the other features.

The ncurses man pages have been undergoing fairly extensive revision for
the past year or so.  Have you consulted a contemporary version of the
tput(1) man page, say from ncurses 6.5, rather than that from 6.1, which
is about 7 years old?

Here is how the "DESCRIPTION" section of the tput(1) man page begins
nowadays.

DESCRIPTION
     tput uses the terminfo library and database to make terminal‐
     specific capabilities and information available to the shell, to
     initialize or reset the terminal, or to report a description of the
     current (or specified) terminal type.  Terminal capabilities are
     accessed by cap‐code.

     terminfo(5) discusses terminal capabilities at length and presents
     a complete list of cap‐codes.

That last quoted sentence in its own paragraph would appear to address
your complaint.

> no need to see this as a bug. But it should become a rule to a have a
> short and corresponding long name. Otherwise it is confusing.

Another development in the ncurses man pages over the past year or so is
that, when a terminal capability is mentioned in text, its C symbol name
is stated followed by its cap-code in parentheses.

For example, in addch(3X) we see the following.

   Forms‐Drawing Characters
     curses defines macros starting with ACS_ that can be used with
     waddch to write line‐drawing and other special characters to the
     screen.  ncurses terms these forms‐drawing characters.  The ACS
     default listed below is used if the acs_chars (acsc) terminfo
     capability does not define a terminal‐specific replacement for it,
     or if the terminal and locale configuration requires Unicode to
     access these characters but the library is unable to use Unicode.

Thomas Dickey maintains up-to-date HTML renderings of the ncurses man
pages at this website.  Man page text is revised fairly often.

https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/

Regards,
Branden

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