Curses with termcap under HP/UX and SCO Xenix

Paul Gillingwater paul at csnz.co.nz
Fri Oct 20 11:32:00 AEST 1989


Hi,
	We have an application that was written under SCO Xenix
which makes use of curses.  To do fancy things like use the
box-drawing capabilities of terminals, we extended the termcap
with a few of our own codes, then changed the TERMCAP environment
variable to point to our modified termcap.  Worked just fine,
until we started to port to HP/UX.  First problem: HP/UX does not
support termcap.  Instead, it offers terminfo libraries, with
"Termcap emulation".  This wasn't a good choice, because our
termcap extensions are of course not supported -- even though
we added them directly to the terminfo file.  It appears that
the emulation uses a lookup table to match the requested termcap
capability name with the matching terminfo simulation -- and of
course terminfo doesn't support box elements.

Ok, we thought, why not just rewrite our code to use terminfo,
and extend the terminfo database?  Problem: which terminfo routines
correspond to tgetent and tgetstr?  Well, according to our
AT&T CURSES(3X) man page, we can use tigetstr!  Fine..   but neither
HP/UX nor SCO Xenix know about tigetstr, nor set_curterm, nor 
del_curterm, etc.  Anyone know where these routines are hiding?

Oh, we finally solved it by using PD termcap routines.  
-- 
Paul Gillingwater, Computer Sciences of New Zealand Limited
Domain: paul at csnz.co.nz  Bang: uunet!vuwcomp!dsiramd!csnz!paul
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