Re: Down with smcup!

[Thomas Dickey]

Thomas Mellman <address@hidden> wrote:

>> (I can guess about more than one possibility).

see - it helps to explain (this is not one of the ones I was considering ;-)

> Hmmm.  Let's see.  Some people think it's cool that when you leave a curses
> program, everything that was in their window disappears.  This is so cool that
> over the years, it has taken over more and more.  It's the Sun way.  I guess
> it came - at some point - from Berkeley.

Perhaps (it's been so long that I don't recall).
A feature of xterm which was not well-supported in The Other System
since terminfo-based systems didn't support it.

> Unfortunately, other people don't like it.  Like me.  When I look at a 
> manpage,
> for example, I leave the pager and expect to be able to see the command I just
> looked up.

There're pros/cons.  With XFree86 xterm you can always peek at the alternate
screen.  I usually have it turned off, but roughly half of the users prefer
it.

> I've gotten used to having a private TERMINFO entry, by infocmp()ing the
> standard one and removing smcup/rmcup.  But in the latest cygwin software
> (which is - otherwise - incredibly wonderful) when I remove the ..cup 
> attributes,

> less() and vi() start making all kinds of noise that my terminal emulation is
> broken.

Reading less' source, I don't see where it would complain.
For "vi", I suppose it may depend on the implementation.

So again - more information is needed to see what you're complaining about.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden> <address@hidden>
http://dickey.his.com
ftp://dickey.his.com