Curses & Terminfo

[Sandy Bryant]

In article <465 at minya.UUCP> jc at minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>for a new terminal.  With terminfo, the files are in some sort
>of binary form (presumably a dump of some memory data structures
>for speed of loading).  You can't edit these.
>
>Presumably you must edit some ascii source and then run some
>command to build the binary file, but I've been unable to find
>any description of how to do it in the manuals.  This terminal
>is sorta like a vt100, except it has more lines.  I'm using a
>vt100 entry, which works, but there are those unused lines that
>I'd like to use.  
>
>Can anyone post a description of how one goes about cloning an
>old terminfo entry and building a modified entry?

The files in /usr/lib/terminfo are the output of a terminfo compiler
called "tic".  The compiler should have a man page in section 1.
For an explanation of how to code a source file for tic, see the 
man page in section 4 for terminfo.  There may also be some documentation
in a manual for curses, depending on what sort of unix package you
have.  I seem to recall some sort of program that purported to 
translate termcaps into terminfos, but it never did a complete job,
and you always ended up going through the termcap entry by hand.
If you have source for your vt100 terminfo entry, start from there. 
Otherwise get a vt100 termcap entry and use the terminfo(4) page to 
translate and then play around with that.

sandy
slb at virginia