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Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cbmvax!vu-vlsi!swatsun!schwartz
From: schwartz@swatsun.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: when using termcap, get it right!
Message-ID: <1149@carthage.swatsun.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-May-87 00:39:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: carthage.1149
Posted: Wed May 27 00:39:51 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 28-May-87 06:39:50 EDT
Organization: Swarthmore College, Swarthmore PA
Lines: 34
Keywords: termcap, curses


Hi gang,

	This is a complaint, I guess.  At Swarthmore we have lots of Adds
Viewpoint terminals.  On these beasties the escape sequences to enter
standout mode, underline mode, normal mode, etc all take up one space
on the screen (gaak).  The problem is that lots of programs that go 
to lots of trouble to figure out what the termcap entries for these
things are never bother to check the width of the entries as printed.
So microEmacs (all versions that I know of, up to 3.8f), for example, 
prints like this on a viewpoint:

	n o s p a c e s

Don't even think about what happens when it tries to highlight the status
line.  Similarly, the latest posting of rogue to comp.sources.games
blindly ignores the "sg" and "ug" termcap entries.

So look, please accord "sg" the respect it deserves, and use it in your code!
Not everyone is lucky enough to have a vt100 :-)

Oh, and speaking of rogue... the readme said it was not yet ported to 
BSD, etc...  I've been working on porting it to Pr1mos (I kid you not).
Pr1me's C compiler has it's own ideas of what is allowed and what's not:
variable length argument lists are death on wheels, probably for 
architectural reasons.  At any rate having all the OS dependent stuff
localised was a big win, and the porting went pretty smoothly.  
The inspiration for this was that I hate walking into the lab and seeing
a room full of Suns busy playing hack :-)

-- 
# Scott Schwartz
# UUCP: ...{{seismo,ihnp4}!bpa, cbmvax!vu-vlsi, sun!liberty}!swatsun!schwartz
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