curses/termcap/terminfo documentation

[John Chambers]

Just a note to thank the people who answered my questions a month or
so ago about good documentation for the curses, termcap, and terminfo
packages.  It seems that there was only one suggestion, sent to me by
quite a lot of people.  The O'Reilly & Associates series of Nutshell
Handbooks has two books: 
	"termcap & terminfo" by John Strang, Tim O'Reilly and Linda Mui
	"Programming with curses" by John Strang

The capitalization is theirs.  Both are quite well written, and I'd
suggest that anyone dealing with terminals on a Unix system (;-) get
a copy of the both for their own bookshelf.  The people I'm working
with keep trying to steal my copies...

Since you last heard from me, I've written me a new shell whose idea
of a "prompt" is a menu, described by a bunch of function calls in
the script that's being interpreted.  Its syntax is plagiarized from
languages like Lisp and Trac (hey, remember Trac?), and treats any
executable file as a function whose value is its standard output.
Variables displayed correspond to modifiable menu fields; any field
may have an expression attached which is evaluated when the user
hits the ENTER key, after which the menu is redisplayed, possibly
with different values for some fields.  

It's lots of fun to play with.  I don't know why I didn't do it years 
ago.  Well, OK, I do know; I've been busy fighting other fires, and 
just now got around to it.  Maybe I should see if anyone else around 
the net might be interested.  I've heard a lot of complaining about
Unix not having a menu-oriented user interface, and not much talk
about doing anything about it.  If you hear such complaints, you
might pass on the word that someone has done something about it,
and it wasn't all that difficult, once I found the right manuals.

One thing I haven't quite got straight yet is how to portably know
when the user has pressed various interesting function keys, such
as the HELP key.  Although most terminals send the escape sequences
in a burst, the program doesn't necessarily get them in a burst.
This causes some slightly tricky buffering.  Or maybe I'm doing
it wrong.  There's also the question of how to match against such 
a list and not gobble up all your cpu in the process, though I 
guess that's not that big a deal.

I did eventually find a copy of the BSD curses manual; as some people 
warned me, it was rather sketchy and not too useful.

Anyway, thanks for all the help, which appeared with almost no flames
to speak of.  

-- 
#echo 'Opinions Copyright 1989 by John Chambers; for licensing information contact:'
echo '	John Chambers <{adelie,ima,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)'
echo ''
saying