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<TITLE>Announcing ncurses @VERSION@</TITLE>
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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>.
-It is also available at
-<A HREF="ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/ncurses">ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/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://invisible-island.net/ncurses/">ftp://invisible-island.net/ncurses/</A> .
<H1>Release Notes</H1>
-We decided to release ncurses as a new whole number release (5.0) because it
-incorporates several interface changes, including some that would invalidate
-existing shared libraries. These are the highlights from the change-log
-since ncurses 4.2 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>The principal source of changes to the interface comes from the
- release of X/Open Curses in 1997. Earlier versions of ncurses (4.0
- and before) were based on a draft version of the specification. The
- release version adds parameters to some functions to support the
- evolving internationalization of curses. These summarize the impact:
-<ul>
- <li>modified several prototypes to correspond with 1997 version of
- X/Open Curses (affects ABI since developers have used attr_get).
+ <li>terminfo installs "xterm-new" as "xterm" entry rather than
+ "xterm-old" (aka xterm-r6).
- <li>corrected prototypes for slk_* functions, using chtype rather than
- attr_t.
+ <li>terminfo data is installed using the tic -x option (few systems
+ still use ncurses 4.2).
- <li>the slk_attr_{set,off,on} functions need an additional void*
- parameter according to XSI.
+ <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>correct macros for wattr_set, wattr_get, separate wattrset macro from
- these to preserve behavior that allows attributes to be combined with
- color pair numbers.
+ <li>modify parameter type in c++ binding for insch() and mvwinsch() to
+ be consistent with underlying ncurses library (was char, is chtype).
- <li>reviewed/updated curses.h, term.h against X/Open Curses Issue 4
- Version 2. This includes making some parameters NCURSES_CONST
- rather than const, e.g., in termcap.h.
+ <li>change NCursesWindow::err_handler() to a virtual function.
- <li>reviewed/corrected macros in curses.h as per XSI document.
+ <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 set_a_attributes and set_pglen_inch to terminfo structure, as per
- XSI and Solaris 2.5.
-</ul>
- <li>The newest version of the X/Open Curses is implemented on Solaris
- and other vendor's systems. It adds new features to the terminfo
- descriptions:
-<ul>
- <li>implement tparm %l format.
- <li>implement tparm printf-style width and precision for %s, %d, %x, %o
- as per XSI.
-</ul>
- <li>We made additional changes to reduce impact by future interface
- changes:
-<ul>
- <li>rename key_names[] array to _nc_key_names since it is not part of
- the curses interface.
+ <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>move macro winch to a function, to hide details of struct ldat
-</ul>
- <li>modify configure script to embed ABI in shared libraries for HP-UX
- 10.x (detailed request by Tim Mooney).
+ <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.
- <li>modify configuration of shared libraries on Digital Unix so that
- versioning is embedded in the library, rather than implied by
- links (patch by Tim Mooney).
</ul>
-New features:
+New features and improvements:
<ul>
- <li>enable sigwinch handler by default.
+ <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>turn on hashmap scrolling code by default
+ <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>improved support for termcap applications
-<ul>
- <li>modify tput to accept termcap names as an alternative to terminfo
- names.
+ <li>change GPM initialization, using dl library to load it
+ dynamically at runtime.
- <li>provide support for termcap PC variable by copying it from terminfo
- data and using it as the padding character in tputs.
+ <li>form, menu and panel libraries support debug-tracing.
- <li>provide support for termcap ospeed variable by copying it from the
- internal cur_term member, and using ospeed as the baudrate
- reference for the delay_output and tputs functions.
+ </ul>
- <li>change name-comparisons in lib_termcap to compare no more than 2
- characters.
+ <li>add NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO.html by Pradeep Padala
+ (see http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/).
- <li>add configure option --enable-tcap-names, which essentially
- allows users to define new capabilities as in termcap.
-</ul>
- <li>add mouse support to ncurses menus.
+ <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>add mouse and dll support for OS/2 EMX
+ <li>modify termcap-parsing to retain 2-character aliases at the
+ beginning of an entry if the "-x" option is used in tic.
- <li>modify terminfo parsing to accept octal and hexadecimal constants
+ <li>filter out long extended names when translating to termcap
+ format. Only two characters are permissible for termcap
+ capability names.
- <li>add configure option --enable-no-padding, to allow environment
- variable $NCURSES_NO_PADDING to eliminate non-mandatory padding,
- thereby making terminal emulators (e.g., for vt100) a little more
- efficient.
+ <li>correct translation of "%%" in terminfo format to termcap,
+ e.g., using "tic -C".
- <li>modify lib_color.c to eliminate dependency on orig_colors and
- orig_pair, since SVr4 curses does not require these either, but
- uses them when they are available.
+ <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 -f option to infocmp and tic, which formats the terminfo
- if/then/else/endif so that they are readable (with newlines and
- tabs).
+ <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>
- <li>modify tic to compile into %'char' form in preference to %{number},
- since that is a little more efficient.
</ul>
Major bug fixes:
<ul>
- <li>modify lib_tstp.c to block SIGTTOU when handling SIGTSTP, fixes a
- problem where ncurses applications which were run via a shell script
- would hang when given a ^Z. Also, check if the terminal's process
- group is consistent, i.e., a shell has not taken ownership of it,
- before deciding to save the current terminal settings in the SIGTSTP
- handler.
-
- <li>suppress sc/rc capabilities from terminal description if they appear
- in smcup/rmcup. This affects only scrolling optimization, to fix a
- problem reported by several people with xterm's alternate screen,
- though the problem is more general.
-
- <li>modify relative_move and tputs to avoid an interaction with the
- BSD-style padding. The relative_move function could produce a string
- to replace on the screen which began with a numeric character, which
- was then interpreted by tputs as padding.
-
- <li>modify setupterm so that cancelled strings are treated the same as
- absent strings, cancelled and absent booleans false (does not affect
- tic, infocmp).
-
- <li>modify lib_vidattr.c to allow for terminal types (e.g., xterm-color)
- which may reset all attributes in the 'op' capability, so that colors
- are set before turning on bold and other attributes, but still after
- turning attributes off.
-
- <li>use 'access()' to check if ncurses library should be permitted to
- open or modify files with fopen/open/link/unlink/remove calls, in
- case the calling application is running in setuid mode.
-
- <li>correction to doupdate, for case where terminal does not support
- insert/delete character. The logic did not check that there was a
- difference in alignment of changes to old/new screens before
- repainting the whole non-blank portion of the line. Modified to fall
- through into logic that reduces by the portion which does not differ.
+
+ <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>cells in the WINDOW which are continuations of a multicolumn
+ character are encoded differently, making repainting more
+ reliable.
+
+ <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>make setcchar() now works when its wchar_t* parameter is
+ pointing to a string which contains more data than can be converted.
+
+ <li>win_wchnstr() now works for more than one cell.
+
+ <li>resizeterm() now processes all levels of window hierarchy.
+
+ <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>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.
+
+</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>
<DL>
<DT> cdk
<DD> Curses Development Kit
-<A HREF="http://www.vexus.ca/CDK.html">Curses Development Kit</a>
-<A HREF="ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/cdk">ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/cdk</A>.
+<br>
+<A HREF="http://invisible-island.net/cdk/">http://invisible-island.net/cdk/</A>
+<br>
+<A HREF="http://www.vexus.ca/products/CDK/">http://www.vexus.ca/products/CDK/</a>
<DT> ded
<DD> directory-editor
-<A HREF="ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/ded">ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/ded</A>.
+<br>
+<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://invisible-island.net/dialog/">http://invisible-island.net/dialog/</A>
<DT> lynx
<DD> the character-screen WWW browser
-<DT> Midnight Commander 4.1
+<br>
+<A HREF="http://lynx.isc.org/release/">http://lynx.isc.org/release/</A>
+<DT> Midnight Commander
<DD> file manager
+<br>
+<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>
<DT> ncftp
<DD> file-transfer utility
+<br>
+<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>
+<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
-<A HREF="ftp://ftp.akk.uni-karlsruhe.de/pub/news/clients/tin-unoff">ftp://ftp.akk.uni-karlsruhe.de/pub/news/clients/tin-unoff</A>.
-<DT> taper
-<DD> tape archive utility
+<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.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.netsonic.fi/~walker/minicom.html">http://www.netsonic.fi/~walker/minicom.html</A>
<DT> vile
<DD> vi-like-emacs
-<A HREF="ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/vile">ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/vile</A>.
+<br>
+<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@clark.net">Thomas Dickey</A>
-and
-<A HREF="mailto:juergen.pfeifer@gmx.net">Jürgen Pfeifer</A>.
-<A HREF="mailto:dickey@clark.net">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://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/ncurses">ftp://ftp.clark.net/pub/dickey/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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