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From: tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: curses inefficiency
Keywords: curses(3), hp262x
Message-ID: <8618@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 90 18:01:46 GMT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 25

I've been trying to use the curses(3) library package for a program
that wants to pop-up an inverse-video window for error messages and
such.  I've found that this works well enough on some terminals, but
the performance *really sucks* when dealing with an HP 360 console or
with the "hpterm" X terminal emulator.  In both of these cases curses
outputs incredibly inefficient sequences to make the window area
become or cease to be inverse video.  (These are "300h" and "hp2622"
terminfo types.)

This seems to be related to use of the "xmc" and "xhp" terminfo
capabilities, but I haven't figured out exactly what the semantics of
these are.  In particular, the manual makes it appear that the
"xmc#0" appearing in the database should be a no-op, but
experimentation proves that it ain't.

I'm running HPUX 6.2.  Does anybody know if this problem has been
repaired in more recent system versions?  Alternately, has anyone
prepared a better terminfo description for these terminal types?

-- 
				tom lane
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