terminfo(5) File Formats terminfo(5)NAMEterminfo - terminal capability data base
SYNOPSIS
/opt/local/share/lib/terminfo/*/*
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. This describes
ncurses version 5.9 (patch 20110404).
Entries in terminfo consist of a sequence of `,' separated fields
(embedded commas may be escaped with a backslash or notated as \054).
White space after the `,' separator is ignored. The first entry for
each terminal gives the names which are known for the terminal, sepa‐
rated 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.
Lines beginning with a `#' in the first column are treated as comments.
While comment lines are legal at any point, the output of captoinfo and
infotocap (aliases for tic) will move comments so they occur only
between entries.
Newlines and leading tabs may be used for formatting entries for read‐
ability. These are removed from parsed entries. The infocmp -f option
relies on this to format if-then-else expressions: the result can be
read by tic.
Terminal names (except for the last, verbose entry) should be chosen
using the following conventions. The particular piece of hardware mak‐
ing 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 fol‐
lowing suffixes should be used where possible:
For more on terminal naming conventions, see the term(7) manual page.
Capabilities
The following is a complete table of the capabilities included in a
terminfo description block and available to terminfo-using code. In
each line of the table,
The variable is the name by which the programmer (at the terminfo
level) accesses the capability.
The capname is the short name used in the text of the database, and is
used by a person updating the database. Whenever possible, capnames
are chosen to be the same as or similar to the ANSI X3.64-1979 standard
(now superseded by ECMA-48, which uses identical or very similar
names). Semantics are also intended to match those of the specifica‐
tion.
The termcap code is the old termcap capability name (some capabilities
are new, and have names which termcap did not originate).
Capability names have no hard length limit, but an informal limit of 5
characters has been adopted to keep them short and to allow the tabs in
the source file Caps to line up nicely.
Finally, the description field attempts to convey the semantics of the
capability. You may find some codes in the description field:
(P) indicates that padding may be specified
#[1-9] in the description field indicates that the string is passed
through tparm with parms as given (#i).
(P*) indicates that padding may vary in proportion to the number of
lines affected
(#i) indicates the ith parameter.
These are the boolean capabilities:
These are the numeric capabilities:
The following numeric capabilities are present in the SVr4.0 term
structure, but are not yet documented in the man page. They came in
with SVr4's printer support.
These are the string capabilities:
terminfo(5)
