TERMINFO (5)

SYNOPSIS

\*d/*/*

DESCRIPTION

Terminfo is a data base describing terminals, used by screen-oriented programs such as nvi(1), rogue(1) and libraries such as curses(3X). Terminfo describes terminals by giving a set of capabilities which they have, by specifying how to perform screen operations, and by specifying padding requirements and initialization sequences.

Entries in terminfo consist of a sequence of `,' separated fields (embedded commas may be escaped with a backslash or notated as \e072). White space after the `,' separator is ignored. The first entry for each terminal gives the names which are known for the terminal, separated by `|' characters. The first name given is the most common abbreviation for the terminal, the last name given should be a long name fully identifying the terminal, and all others are understood as synonyms for the terminal name. All names but the last should be in lower case and contain no blanks; the last name may well contain upper case and blanks for readability.

Terminal names (except for the last, verbose entry) should be chosen using the following conventions. The particular piece of hardware making up the terminal should have a root name, thus ``hp2621''. This name should not contain hyphens. Modes that the hardware can be in, or user preferences, should be indicated by appending a hyphen and a mode suffix. Thus, a vt100 in 132 column mode would be vt100-w. The following suffixes should be used where possible:

center ;
l c l
l l l.
Suffix       Meaning Example
-nn       Number of lines on the screen   aaa-60
-np       Number of pages of memory       c100-4p
-am     With automargins (usually the default)  vt100-am
-m      Mono mode; suppress color               ansi-m
-mc     Magic cookie; spaces when highlighting  wy30-mc
-na     No arrow keys (leave them in local)     c100-na
-nam    Without automatic margins               vt100-nam
-nl     No status line                          att4415-nl
-ns     No status line                          hp2626-ns
-rv     Reverse video                           c100-rv
-s      Enable status line                      vt100-s
-vb     Use visible bell instead of beep        wy370-vb
-w      Wide mode (> 80 columns, usually 132)   vt100-w

For more on terminal naming conventions, see the term(7) manual page.