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-<TITLE>Announcing ncurses 5.1</TITLE>
+<TITLE>Announcing ncurses 5.5</TITLE>
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-<H1>Announcing ncurses 5.1</H1>
+<H1>Announcing ncurses 5.5</H1>
The ncurses (new curses) library is a free software emulation of
curses in System V Release 4.0, and more. It uses terminfo format,
and has all the other SYSV-curses enhancements over BSD curses.<P>
In mid-June 1995, the maintainer of 4.4BSD curses declared that he
-considered 4.4BSD curses obsolete, and is encouraging the keepers of
-Unix releases such as BSD/OS, freeBSD and netBSD to switch over to
+considered 4.4BSD curses obsolete, and encouraged the keepers of
+Unix releases such as BSD/OS, FreeBSD and NetBSD to switch over to
ncurses.<P>
-The ncurses code was developed under GNU/Linux. It should port easily to
-any ANSI/POSIX-conforming UNIX. It has even been ported to OS/2 Warp!<P>
+The ncurses code was developed under GNU/Linux.
+It has been in use for some time with OpenBSD as the system curses library,
+and on FreeBSD and NetBSD as an external package.
+It should port easily to any ANSI/POSIX-conforming UNIX.
+It has even been ported to OS/2 Warp!<P>
The distribution includes the library and support utilities, including a
terminfo compiler tic(1), a decompiler infocmp(1), clear(1), tput(1), tset(1),
The ncurses distribution is available via anonymous FTP at
the GNU distribution site
-<A HREF="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses">ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses</A>.
+<A HREF="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ncurses/">ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ncurses/</A> .
<br>It is also available at
-<A HREF="ftp://dickey.his.com/ncurses">ftp://dickey.his.com/ncurses</A>.
+<A HREF="ftp://invisible-island.net/ncurses/">ftp://invisible-island.net/ncurses/</A> .
<H1>Release Notes</H1>
-This release is designed to be upward compatible from ncurses 5.0; very few
-applications will require recompilation, depending on the platform.
-These are the highlights from the change-log since ncurses 5.0 release.
+This release is designed to be upward compatible from ncurses 5.0 through 5.4;
+very few applications will require recompilation, depending on the platform.
+These are the highlights from the change-log since ncurses 5.4 release.
<p>
Interface changes:
<ul>
- <li>made the extended terminal capabilities
- (<code>configure --enable-tcap-names</code>)
- a standard feature (though the configure script can disable it,
- it is built by default).
-
- <li>removed the <code>trace()</code> function and related trace support
- from the production library. This is the only interface change that
- may cause problems with existing applications linked to shared
- libraries, since not all platforms use the minor version number.
-
- <li>explicitly initialized to zero several data items which were
- implicitly initialized, e.g., cur_term. If not explicitly
- initialized, their storage type is C (common), and causes problems
- linking on some platforms.
-
- <li>modified curses.h.in, undef'ing some symbols to avoid conflict with
- C++ STL.
+ <li>terminfo installs "xterm-new" as "xterm" entry rather than
+ "xterm-old" (aka xterm-r6).
+
+ <li>terminfo data is installed using the tic -x option (few systems
+ still use ncurses 4.2).
+
+ <li>modify C++ binding to work with newer C++ compilers by providing
+ initializers and using modern casts. Old-style header names are
+ still used in this release to allow compiling with not-so-old
+ compilers.
+
+ <li>modify parameter type in c++ binding for insch() and mvwinsch() to
+ be consistent with underlying ncurses library (was char, is chtype).
+
+ <li>change NCursesWindow::err_handler() to a virtual function.
+
+ <li>form and menu libraries now work with wide-character data.
+ Applications which bypassed the form library and manipulated the
+ FIELD.buf data directly will not work properly with libformw,
+ since that no longer points to an array of char. The
+ set_field_buffer() and field_buffer() functions translate to/from
+ the actual field data.
+
+
+ <li>add symbol to curses.h which can be used to suppress include of
+ stdbool.h, e.g.,
+ <pre>
+ #define NCURSES_ENABLE_STDBOOL_H 0
+ #include <curses.h>
+ </pre>
+
+ <li>change SP->_current_attr to a pointer, adjust ifdef's to ensure
+ that libtinfo.so and libtinfow.so have the same ABI. The reason
+ for this is that the corresponding data which belongs to the
+ upper-level ncurses library has a different size in each model.
+
+ <li>winnstr() now returns multibyte character strings for the
+ wide-character configuration.
+
+ <li>assume_default_colors() no longer requires that
+ use_default_colors() be called first.
+
+ <li>data_ahead() now works with wide-characters.
+
+ <li>slk_set() and slk_wset() now accept and store multibyte or
+ multicolumn characters.
+
+ <li>start_color() now returns OK if colors have
+ already been started.
+ start_color() also returns ERR if it cannot allocate memory.
+
+ <li>pair_content() now returns -1 for consistency with init_pair()
+ if it corresponds to the default-color.
+
+ <li>unctrl() now returns null if its parameter does not correspond
+ to an unsigned char.
+
</ul>
-New features:
+New features and improvements:
<ul>
- <li>added a new extension, <code>assume_default_colors()</code> to
- provide better control over the use of default colors. This is
- the principal visible difference between ncurses 5.1 and preceding
- versions. The new extension allows an application to specify what
- colors pair 0 uses.
- <p>
- <em>NOTE</em>: Pair 0 defaults to white on black unless
- you have invoked <code>use_default_colors()</code> or set it via
- <code>assume_default_colors()</code>. An application that calls
- <code>start_colors()</code> without setting the background color
- will consistently have a black background no matter what color your
- terminal's background actually is.
-
- <li>made several fixes to the terminfo-to-termcap conversion, and
- have been using the generated termcaps without further hand-tuning.
- This builds on the extension <code>use_extended_names()</code> by
- adding "obsolete" termcap strings to terminfo.src
- <ul>
- <li>modified <code>tic</code> so that if extended names (i.e.,
- configure --enable-tcap-names) are active, then <code>tic -x</code>
- will also write "obsolete" capabilities that are present in the
- terminfo source.
-
- <li>added screen's AX capability (for ECMA SGR 39 and 49) to applicable
- terminfo entries, use presence of this as a check for a small
- improvement in setting default colors.
-
- <li>add -a option to tic and infocmp, which retains commented-out
- capabilities during source translation/comparison, e.g., captoinfo
- and infotocap.
- </ul>
-
- <li>implemented limited support for UTF-8, useful with XFree86 xterm:
- <ul>
- <li>if the <code>configure --enable-widec</code> option is
- given, append 'w' to names of the generated libraries (e.g.,
- libncursesw.so) to avoid conflict with existing ncurses libraries.
- <li>add a simple UTF-8 output driver to the experimental
- wide-character support. If any of the environment variables
- LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE or LANG contain the string "UTF-8", this driver
- will be used to translate the output to UTF-8.
- <li>modified view.c to make a rudimentary viewer of UTF-8 text.
- </ul>
-
- <li>modify <code>raw()</code> and <code>noraw()</code> to clear/restore
- IEXTEN flag which affects <code>stty lnext</code> on systems such as FreeBSD
-
- <li>reordered tests during mouse initialization to allow for gpm to run
- in xterm, or for xterm to be used under OS/2 EMX. Also dropped test
- for <code>$DISPLAY</code> in favor of the terminfo capability
- <code>kmous=\E[M</code> or
- if <code>$TERM</code> environment variable contains "xterm".
-
- <li>added configure option <code>--with-manpage-symlinks</code>, which
- provides for fully indexing manpage entries by making symbolic links
- for the aliases.
-
- <li>changed <code>unctrl()</code> to render C1 characters (128-159) as
- <code>~@</code>, <code>~A</code>, etc.
-
- <li>add experimental configure option --enable-colorfgbg to check for
- $COLORTERM variable as set by rxvt/aterm/Eterm.
-
- <li>made the <code>infocmp -F</code> option less verbose.
-
- <li>dropped support for gnat 3.10 (gnat 3.12 is current).
+ <li>library
+ <ul>
+ <li>environment variable NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS supports
+ miscellaneous terminal emulators which ignore alternate
+ character set escape sequences when in UTF-8 mode.
+
+ <li>modify initialization of key lookup table so that if an extended
+ capability (tic -x) string is defined, and its name begins with 'k',
+ ncurses will automatically treat it as a key.
+
+ <li>change GPM initialization, using dl library to load it
+ dynamically at runtime.
+
+ <li>form, menu and panel libraries support debug-tracing.
+
+ </ul>
+
+ <li>add NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO.html by Pradeep Padala
+ (see http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/).
+
+ <li>programs:
+
+ <li>infocmp:
+ <ul>
+ <li>The -i option now matches 8-bit controls against its table
+ entries, e.g., so it can analyze the xterm-8bit entry.
+
+ <li>add "-x" option to infocmp like tic's "-x", for use in "-F"
+ comparisons. This modifies infocmp to only report extended
+ capabilities if the -x option is given, making this more
+ consistent with tic. Some scripts may break, since infocmp
+ previous gave this information without an option.
+
+ </ul>
+
+ <li>tic:
+
+ <ul>
+
+ <li>modify termcap-parsing to retain 2-character aliases at the
+ beginning of an entry if the "-x" option is used in tic.
+
+ <li>filter out long extended names when translating to termcap
+ format. Only two characters are permissible for termcap
+ capability names.
+
+ <li>correct translation of "%%" in terminfo format to termcap,
+ e.g., using "tic -C".
+
+ <li>modify the "-c -v" options to ignore delays when comparing
+ strings. Also modify it to ignore a canceled sgr string,
+ e.g., for terminals which cannot properly combine attributes
+ in one control sequence.
+
+ <li>add a check for improperly ended strings, i.e., where a
+ following line begins in column 1.
+
+ <li>add a check in tic for terminfo entries having an sgr0 but no
+ sgr string. This confuses Tru64 and HPUX curses when combined
+ with color, e.g., making them leave line-drawing characters in
+ odd places.
+
+ <li>add check (with debug configuration) that provides about the
+ runtime changes that would be made to sgr0 for termcap
+ applications.
+
+ </ul>
+
+ <li>tset:
+
+ <ul>
+
+ <li>add -c and -w options to allow user to suppress ncurses'
+ resizing of the terminal emulator window in the special case
+ where it is not able to detect the true size.
+
+ </ul>
</ul>
Major bug fixes:
<ul>
- <li>modified infocmp -e, -E options to ensure that generated fallback.c
- type for Booleans agrees with term.h
- <li>documented a special case of incompatiblity between ncurses 4.2 and
- 5.0, added a section for this in INSTALL.
+ <li>improve logic in tgetent() which adjusts the termcap "me" string
+ to work with ISO-2022 string used in xterm-new.
+ This is a feature that was incompletely implemented in ncurses 5.3.
+ ncurses attempts to provide termcap clients with the portion of
+ the sgr0 (termcap "me") string that does not reset line-drawing.
- <li>corrected tests for file-descriptors in OS/2 EMX mouse support. A
- negative value could be used by FD_SET, causing the select() call to
- wait indefinitely.
+ <li>cells in the WINDOW which are continuations of a multicolumn
+ character are encoded differently, making repainting more
+ reliable.
- <li>made 'tput flash' work properly for xterm by flushing output in
- delay_output() when using napms(), and modifying xterm's terminfo to
- specify no padding character. Otherwise, xterm's reported baud rate
- could mislead ncurses into producing too few padding characters.
+ <li>amend change to setupterm() in ncurses 5.4 (20030405) which would
+ reuse the value of cur_term if the same output was selected. This
+ now reuses it only when setupterm() is called from tgetent(),
+ which has no notion of separate SCREENs. Note that tgetent() must
+ be called after initscr() or newterm() to use this feature.
- <li>modified lib_addch.c to allow repeated update to the lower-right
- corner, rather than displaying only the first character written until
- the cursor is moved. Recent versions of SVr4 curses can update the
- lower-right corner, and behave this way.
+ <li>make setcchar() now works when its wchar_t* parameter is
+ pointing to a string which contains more data than can be converted.
- <li>modified echo() behavior of getch() to match Solaris curses for
- carriage return and backspace (reported by Neil Zanella).
+ <li>win_wchnstr() now works for more than one cell.
- <li>corrected offsets used for subwindows in <code>wresize()</code>
+ <li>resizeterm() now processes all levels of window hierarchy.
- <li>modified configure script so AC_MSG_ERROR is temporarily defined to
- a warning in AC_PROG_CXX to make it recover from a missing C++
- compiler without requiring user to add --without-cxx option
+ <li>disable GPM mouse support when $TERM happens to be prefixed with
+ "xterm". Gpm_Open() would otherwise assert that it can deal with
+ mouse events in this case.
- <li>corrected logic in lib_twait.c as used by lib_mouse.c for GPM mouse
- support when poll() is used rather than select().
+ <li>add SP->_screen_acs_map[], used to ensure that mapping of missing
+ line-drawing characters is handled properly. For example, ACS_DARROW
+ is absent from xterm-new, and it was coincidentally displayed the
+ same as ACS_BTEE.
- <li>made several fixes for buffer overflows, unchecked recursion,
- improvements in performance, etc. See the NEWS file for details.
+</ul>
+
+Portability:
+<ul>
+ <li>configure script:
+ <ul>
+ <li>new options:
+ <dl>
+ <dt>--enable-largefile
+ <dd>set compiler and linker flags to use largefile support.
+
+ <dt>--enable-ext-colors
+ <dd>Allow encoding of 256 foreground
+ and background colors, e.g., with the xterm-256color or
+ xterm-88color terminfo entries.
+ This requires ABI 6 because it changes the size of cchar_t.
+
+ <dt>--enable-ext-mouse
+ <dd>This defines NCURSES_MOUSE_VERSION 2, and modifies the encoding of
+ mouse events to support wheel mice, which may transmit buttons
+ 4 and 5. This works with xterm and similar terminal
+ emulators.
+ This requires ABI 6 because it changes the encoding of
+ mouse events.
+
+ <dt>--with-chtype
+ <dd>overriding of the non-LP64 model's use of chtype
+
+ <dt>--with-mmask-t
+ <dd>overriding of the non-LP64 model's use of mmask_t
+
+ <dt>--without-xterm-new
+ <dd>Installs "xterm-old" as the "xterm" entry of the terminfo
+ database.
+
+ </dl>
+
+ <li>The --with-termlib option now accepts a value which sets
+ the name of the terminfo library. This would allow a packager to
+ build libtinfow.so renamed to coincide with libtinfo.so
+
+ <li>fixes/improvements for cross-compiling:
+
+ <ul>
+ <li>suppress $suffix in misc/run_tic.sh when cross-compiling.
+ This allows cross-compiles to use the host's tic program to
+ handle the "make install.data" step.
+
+ <li>correct BUILD_CPPFLAGS substitution in ncurses/Makefile.in, to allow
+ cross-compiling from a separate directory tree.
+
+ </ul>
+
+ </ul>
+
+ <li>library:
+ <ul>
+
+ <li>add ifdef's for _LP64 in curses.h to avoid using wasteful
+ 64-bits for chtype and mmask_t, but add configure option
+ --disable-lp64 in case anyone used that configuration.
+
+ <li>modify C++ binding to use some C internal functions to make it
+ compile properly on Solaris (and other platforms).
+
+ <li>remove check in newwin() that prevents allocating windows that
+ extend beyond the screen (Solaris does this).
+
+ <li>check for <code>nl_langinfo(CODESET)</code>, use it if available.
+ This replaces ad hoc tests of environment variables to
+ check if the terminal is setup for UTF-8 encoding.
+ Applications which do not call <code>setlocale()</code>
+ should be corrected, to make them work properly with
+ UTF-8 encoding.
+ <br>
+ <strong>In particular, applications which assume (and
+ do not call <code>setlocale()</code>) that
+ Latin-1 codes are printable will no longer work in
+ a UTF-8 locale since the ad hoc check of environment
+ variables to see if the locale was UTF-8 is not used
+ when <code>nl_langinfo(CODESET)</code> is available.</strong>
+
+ <li>use setlocale() to query the program's current locale rather
+ than using getenv(). This supports applications which rely
+ upon legacy treatment of 8-bit characters when the locale is
+ not initialized.
+
+ </ul>
</ul>
<H1>Features of Ncurses</H1>
<DT> cdk
<DD> Curses Development Kit
<br>
-<A HREF="http://www.vexus.ca/CDK.html">http://www.vexus.ca/CDK.html</a>
+<A HREF="http://invisible-island.net/cdk/">http://invisible-island.net/cdk/</A>
<br>
-<A HREF="http://dickey.his.com/cdk/cdk.html">http://dickey.his.com/cdk</A>.
+<A HREF="http://www.vexus.ca/products/CDK/">http://www.vexus.ca/products/CDK/</a>
<DT> ded
<DD> directory-editor
<br>
-<A HREF="http://dickey.his.com/ded/ded.html">http://dickey.his.com/ded</A>.
+<A HREF="http://invisible-island.net/ded/">http://invisible-island.net/ded/</A>
<DT> dialog
<DD> the underlying application used in Slackware's setup, and the basis
for similar applications on GNU/Linux.
<br>
-<A HREF="http://dickey.his.com/dialog/dialog.html">http://dickey.his.com/dialog</A>.
+<A HREF="http://invisible-island.net/dialog/">http://invisible-island.net/dialog/</A>
<DT> lynx
<DD> the character-screen WWW browser
<br>
-<A HREF="http://lynx.isc.org/release/">http://lynx.isc.org/release</A>.
-<DT> Midnight Commander 4.1
+<A HREF="http://lynx.isc.org/release/">http://lynx.isc.org/release/</A>
+<DT> Midnight Commander
<DD> file manager
<br>
-<A HREF="www.gnome.org/mc/">www.gnome.org/mc/</A>.
+<A HREF="http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/">http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/</A>
<DT> mutt
<DD> mail utility
<br>
-<A HREF="http://www.mutt.org">http://www.mutt.org</A>.
+<A HREF="http://www.mutt.org/">http://www.mutt.org/</A>
<DT> ncftp
<DD> file-transfer utility
<br>
-<A HREF="http://www.ncftp.com">http://www.ncftp.com</A>.
+<A HREF="http://www.ncftp.com/">http://www.ncftp.com/</A>
<DT> nvi
<DD> New vi versions 1.50 are able to use ncurses versions 1.9.7 and later.
<br>
-<A HREF="http://www.bostic.com/vi/">http://www.bostic.com/vi/</A>.
+<A HREF="http://www.bostic.com/vi/">http://www.bostic.com/vi/</A>
+<br>
+<DT> pinfo
+<DD> Lynx-like info browser.
+<A HREF="http://dione.ids.pl/~pborys/software/pinfo/">http://dione.ids.pl/~pborys/software/pinfo/</A>
<DT> tin
<DD> newsreader, supporting color, MIME
-<br>
-<A HREF="http://www.tin.org">http://www.tin.org</A>.
-<DT> taper
-<DD> tape archive utility
-<br>
-<A HREF="http://members.iinet.net.au/~yusuf/taper/">http://members.iinet.net.au/~yusuf/taper/</A>.
+<A HREF="http://www.tin.org/">http://www.tin.org/</A>
<DT> vh-1.6
<DD> Volks-Hypertext browser for the Jargon File
<br>
-<A HREF="http://www.bg.debian.org/Packages/unstable/text/vh.html">http://www.bg.debian.org/Packages/unstable/text/vh.html</A>.
+<A HREF="http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/text/vh.html">http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/text/vh.html</A>
</DL>
as well as some that use ncurses for the terminfo support alone:
<DL>
<DT> minicom
<DD> terminal emulator
<br>
-<A HREF="http://www.pp.clinet.fi/~walker/minicom.html">http://www.pp.clinet.fi/~walker/minicom.html</A>.
+<A HREF="http://www.netsonic.fi/~walker/minicom.html">http://www.netsonic.fi/~walker/minicom.html</A>
<DT> vile
<DD> vi-like-emacs
<br>
-<A HREF="http://dickey.his.com/vile/vile.html">http://dickey.his.com/vile</A>.
+<A HREF="http://invisible-island.net/vile/">http://invisible-island.net/vile/</A>
</DL>
<P>
<H2>Who's Who and What's What</H2>
-The original developers of ncurses are <A
-HREF="mailto:zmbenhal@netcom.com">Zeyd Ben-Halim</A> and
-<A HREF="http://www.ccil.org/~esr/home.html">Eric S. Raymond</A>.
+Zeyd Ben-Halim
+started it from a previous package pcurses, written by Pavel Curtis.
+Eric S. Raymond
+continued development.
+Jürgen Pfeifer wrote most of the form and menu libraries.
Ongoing work is being done by
-<A HREF="mailto:dickey@herndon4.his.com">Thomas Dickey</A>
-and
-<A HREF="mailto:juergen.pfeifer@gmx.net">Jürgen Pfeifer</A>.
-<A HREF="mailto:dickey@herndon4.his.com">Thomas Dickey</A>
-acts as the maintainer for the Free Software Foundation, which holds the
-copyright on ncurses.
+<A HREF="mailto:dickey@invisible-island.net">Thomas Dickey</A>.
+Thomas Dickey
+acts as the maintainer for the Free Software Foundation,
+which holds the copyright on ncurses.
Contact the current maintainers at
<A HREF="mailto:bug-ncurses@gnu.org">bug-ncurses@gnu.org</A>.
<P>
testing of this package.<P>
Beta versions of ncurses and patches to the current release are made available at
-<A HREF="ftp://dickey.his.com/ncurses">ftp://dickey.his.com/ncurses</A>.
+<A HREF="ftp://invisible-island.net/ncurses/">ftp://invisible-island.net/ncurses/</A> .
<H2>Future Plans</H2>
<UL>
<H2>Other Related Resources</H2>
-The distribution includes and uses a version of the terminfo-format
-terminal description file maintained by Eric Raymond.
-<A HREF="http://earthspace.net/~esr/terminfo">http://earthspace.net/~esr/terminfo</A>.<P>
+The distribution provides a newer version of the terminfo-format
+terminal description file maintained by
+<A HREF="http://www.catb.org/~esr/terminfo/">Eric Raymond</A> .
+Unlike the older version, the termcap and terminfo data are provided
+in the same file.<P>
You can find lots of information on terminal-related topics
not covered in the terminfo file at
<A HREF="http://www.cs.utk.edu/~shuford/terminal_index.html">Richard Shuford's
-archive</A>.
+archive</A> .
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