Searching for terminal descriptions in $HOME/.terminfo and
TERMINFO_DIRS is not supported by older implementations.
Some SVr4 curses implementations, and all previous to SVr4, do
not interpret the %A and %O operators in parameter strings.
SVr4/XPG4 do not specify whether msgr licenses movement while in
an alternate-character-set mode (such modes may, among other
things, map CR and NL to characters that do not trigger local
motions). The ncurses implementation ignores msgr in ALTCHARSET
mode. This raises the possibility that an XPG4 implementation
making the opposite interpretation may need terminfo entries made
for ncurses to have msgr turned off.
The ncurses library handles insert-character and insert-character
modes in a slightly non-standard way to get better update
efficiency. See the Insert/Delete Character subsection above.
The parameter substitutions for set_clock and display_clock are
not documented in SVr4 or the XSI Curses standard. They are
deduced from the documentation for the AT&T 505 terminal.
Be careful assigning the kmous capability. The ncurses library
wants to interpret it as KEY_MOUSE, for use by terminals and
emulators like xterm that can return mouse-tracking information
in the keyboard-input stream.
X/Open Curses does not mention italics. Portable applications
must assume that numeric capabilities are signed 16-bit values.
This includes the no_color_video (ncv) capability. The 32768
mask value used for italics with ncv can be confused with an
absent or cancelled ncv. If italics should work with colors,
then the ncv value must be specified, even if it is zero.
Different commercial ports of terminfo and curses support
different subsets of the XSI Curses standard and (in some cases)
different extension sets. Here is a summary, accurate as of
October 1995:
• SVR4, Solaris, ncurses -- These support all SVr4
capabilities.
• SGI -- Supports the SVr4 set, adds one undocumented extended
string capability (set_pglen).
• SVr1, Ultrix -- These support a restricted subset of terminfo
capabilities. The booleans end with xon_xoff; the numerics
with width_status_line; and the strings with prtr_non.
• HP/UX -- Supports the SVr1 subset, plus the SVr[234] numerics
num_labels, label_height, label_width, plus function keys 11
through 63, plus plab_norm, label_on, and label_off, plus
some incompatible extensions in the string table.
• AIX -- Supports the SVr1 subset, plus function keys 11
through 63, plus a number of incompatible string table
extensions.
• OSF -- Supports both the SVr4 set and the AIX extensions.
