[screen-devel] [bug #54556] screen is producing invalid TERMCAPs

[Thomas Dickey]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #54556 (project screen):

I see now (wasn't paying attention to the name of the terminal description). 
I agree the problem shows up when ncurses can't find the terminfo entry (and
while I can see some places to improve ncurses, don't find it likely that
Apple will make a timely fix based on my changes).

That's ncurses 5.7 (which you can see by doing a "strings" on the library). 
Perhaps the filename was from Apple's initial package (5.4's not relevant).

If ncurses is configured with support for $TERMCAP, that's checked after
trying to find a suitable terminfo entry.  screen's formatting a "SC" there
because termcap files used to be optimized to use the first two bytes. 
ncurses ignores that when reading source, but there's normally no need from an
environment variable (since there's only one entry to use).

Apple doesn't provide a screen.xterm-256color (what $TERM was set to), but
/usr/bin/tic should be able to compile this (not optimal):

screen.xterm-256color|GNU Screen using 256 colors,                   
        use=xterm+256color, use=screen

and since it has the $HOME/.terminfo feature, it should install the file in
that directory by default (if not running as root).  In a quick test, it did
that...

The terminfo output from ncurses6.1 will use a value for "pairs" which the
older tic will reject (making it "pairs#0"), so the suggested workaround in
comment #2 won't be satisfactory.  You could edit the intermediate text file,
changing 0x10000 to 0x7fff, and get a better result -- but how much better
depends on what the actual terminal emulator is (xterm, Terminal.app and
iTerm2 all are different).

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