Re: terminfo for the Mac OS X Terminal

[Ben Wiley Sittler]

Yeah, I wrote the "nsterm" terminfo too (several years ago, now.) More
recently Alain Bench, Christian Ebert,
and D P Schreber added the "nsterm-16color" entry to describe newer
features, and I added a (preliminary) iTerm.app entry to describe
iTerm (from http://iterm.sourceforge.net/  ), although the description
is fairly immature and inaccurate at this point.

I keep my local edition of nsterm.ti here:

http://zoehep.xent.com/~bsittler/nsterm.ti

Note, however, that that file also contains copies of ansi+enq,
vt100+enq, xterm+256color, vt100+keypad, vt100+pfkeys, and
ibm+16color.

However, I haven't made any substantial changes to it for a while now,
as I've mostly used iTerm.app recently, since it allows key remapping
(extremely useful if you use GNU screen -- remap ^A to send ^Aa, and
F11 to send ^A, and you can use emacs without thinking twice about
navigating to the beginning of the line). Unfortunately the many
features of iTerm.app are not adaquately described by any existing
terminfo, and I haven't had time to properly work one up for it.

I really need to play with the newer versions of Terminal.app and
update the terminfo (if needed.) At the moment, though, I am still
using Mac OS X 10.4 with Terminal.app version 1.5
(TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION=133) which claims to be "xterm-color" but
actually isn't (and crashes fairly regularly when driven by ncurses
using the "xterm-color" terminfo.) Using the older "nsterm-7" entry
does seem to work without crashing, but there are likely new
Terminal.app features it does not describe.

Passing vttest is nice as far as it goes, but it turns out not
crashing under occasional heavy usage is a nice feature in a terminal,
too. In earlier versions of Terminal.app I used myman (
http://geocities.com/bsittler/#myman ) to figure out which parts of
the terminfo to disable in order to avoid crashes.

-Ben

On Jan 14, 2008 3:24 AM, Thomas Dickey <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Michail Vidiassov wrote:
>
> > Dear Ben and All,
> >
> > On Sat, 12 Jan 2008, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote:
> >
> >> The script and the terminfo are attached to this message,
> >> and they're also available here:
> >>
> >> http://zoehep.xent.com/~bsittler/mach_acs
> >> http://zoehep.xent.com/~bsittler/xnuppc.ti
> >
> > There is a comment
> >
> > # If you're looking for a description of the Terminal.app terminal
> > # emulator which runs under the Mac OS X Quartz windowing system, see
> > # the "nsterm" entry instead.
> >
> > Who are the developers of that "nsterm" entry, was it updated for Mac OS X
> > 10.5 and/or how was it created?
>
> The changelog at the bottom of terminfo.src shows this:
>
> # 2001-04-14
> #       * correct definitions of shifted editing keys for xterm-xfree86 -TD
> #       * add "Apple_Terminal" entries -Benjamin Sittler
> #       * remove time-delays from "Apple_Terminal" entries -TD
> #       * make sgr entries time-delays consistent with individual caps -TD
>
>
> # 2001-07-21
> #       * renamed "Apple_Terminal" entries to "nsterm" to work with Solaris's
> #         tic which handles names no longer than 14 characters.  Add
> #         corresponding descriptions for the Darwin PowerPC console named
> #         "xnuppc" -Benjamin Sittler
>
> > Terminal.app claims to be an xterm, but what are test results?
>
> From newsgroup discussion, I understand that it does reasonably well
> with vttest for the VT102 stuff, but haven't seen any reliable source
> discussing compatibility with xterm.  (I seem to recall some newsgroup
> comment that the mouse stuff doesn't work).
>
> --
> Thomas E. Dickey
> http://invisible-island.net
> ftp://invisible-island.net
>