terminfo

[Jilles Tjoelker]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 07:59:39PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2014-Feb-23 14:49:25 +0100, Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl> wrote:
> >- Who cares about double-width characters? I don't know a single
> >program that uses this. In the worst case, you can just use fullwidth
> >CJK for certain characters.

> I wrote an app at $previous-job that used double-height/double-width
> characters in xterm.  I might have been able to use unicode but then
> everyone who wanted to use in would need to have configured their xterm
> for UTF-8 - and I don't believe had done that.

> >- Who cares about 88 colour support? Just use 256 colours.

> Assuming your app supports that.

> >- Who cares about ACS? Unicode already has those characters.

> Again, that assumes your app supports unicode.

> >People are nowadays only interested in having a 16 or 256 colour,
> >UTF-8 enabled terminal.

> And running legacy apps that predate unicode.

The proposal here is not to change terminal emulators to remove all
legacy features. Rather, it is proposed to create one termcap or
terminfo entry that will work with all modern terminal emulators.
Applications using termcap or terminfo (either directly or indirectly
through ncurses) will then stop using various legacy features. In the
case of features like legacy ACS and 88-colour, the application does not
lose any user-visible functionality.

In the long run, support for the legacy features will probably
deteriorate, especially in terminal emulators with maintainers less
passionate about the details of terminal emulation than xterm's
maintainer.

I think it is worth it to simplify terminals. Instead of having people
choose how they want their terminal to work improperly, provide one way
and concentrate on making that work as well as possible (no visual
artifacts, 256 colours, Unicode, key combinations like Ctrl+Home, etc.)

I also like the idea of some applications sending control sequences
directly, without using curses or even termcap/terminfo.

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker