xterm terminfo spec change in ncurses

Michael Cronenworth mike at cchtml.com
Fri Jun 26 19:22:44 UTC 2009


Over the past three years, I have yet to know what is the "official"
xterm spec. Everyone seems to follow whatever they want.

Some history:
I use a home-grown application that is exclusively terminal-based. It
relies on SHIFT+Fn for certain functionality following the "official"
xterm spec.

Sometime back in Fedora 7 (yep, 2 years ago) the vte library decided to
fix a "bug"[1] with the escape sequences with CTRL+Arrow keys. This
change caused SHIFT+F1 through SHIFT+F4 to emit the wrong xterm sequences.

Example:
xterm spec[2]
SHIFT+F4 = ^[O2S
vte-based terminal (gnome-terminal, Terminal, etc.)
SHIFT+F4 = ^[O1;2S

Needless to say, my app wouldn't function correctly.

With Fedora 11, a new ncurses-base package has brought new xterm specs!
I didn't know xterm was still in pro-active development.

new xterm spec
SHIFT+F1 = ^[[1;2S

I realize most people won't see this because it seems rare for apps to
need SHIFT+Fn, but it's a two year old problem fixing to become a three
year old problem. I'd like to squash these spec differences once and for
all. My bug[3] reports[4] that include solutions have gone unheeded.

Now it seems that the "official" spec[2] page is messed up. It used to
show that ^[O2S was the correct sequence for SHIFT+F4, but the images
are distorted.

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337252
[2] http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html
[3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=249573
[4] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540179




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