xterm terminfo spec change in ncurses

[Miroslav Lichvar]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 02:22:44PM -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Over the past three years, I have yet to know what is the "official"
> xterm spec. Everyone seems to follow whatever they want.
> 
> Some history:
> I use a home-grown application that is exclusively terminal-based. It
> relies on SHIFT+Fn for certain functionality following the "official"
> xterm spec.

Does the application use ncurses or the sequences are hardcoded? The
xterm terminfo entry should correspond to the default xterm
configuration.

> Sometime back in Fedora 7 (yep, 2 years ago) the vte library decided to
> fix a "bug"[1] with the escape sequences with CTRL+Arrow keys. This
> change caused SHIFT+F1 through SHIFT+F4 to emit the wrong xterm sequences.
> 
> Example:
> xterm spec[2]
> SHIFT+F4 = ^[O2S
> vte-based terminal (gnome-terminal, Terminal, etc.)
> SHIFT+F4 = ^[O1;2S
> 
> Needless to say, my app wouldn't function correctly.
> 
> With Fedora 11, a new ncurses-base package has brought new xterm specs!
> I didn't know xterm was still in pro-active development.

Yes, it still is.

> new xterm spec
> SHIFT+F1 = ^[[1;2S

xterm supports four different encodings, please see modifyFunctionKeys
description in xterm man page. Number 2 is now the "official" one (the
upstream default) and it matches the terminfo entry.

For the other terminals imitating xterm you may need to set TERM=gnome
or similar.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar