The Termcap Library - Introduction

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# Introduction

Termcap is a library and data base that enables programs to use display terminals in a terminal-independent manner. It originated in Berkeley Unix.

The termcap data base describes the capabilities of hundreds of different display terminals in great detail. Some examples of the information recorded for a terminal could include how many columns wide it is, what string to send to move the cursor to an arbitrary position (including how to encode the row and column numbers), how to scroll the screen up one or several lines, and how much padding is needed for such a scrolling operation.

The termcap library is provided for easy access this data base in programs that want to do terminal-independent character-based display output.

This manual describes the GNU version of the termcap library, which has some extensions over the Unix version. All the extensions are identified as such, so this manual also tells you how to use the Unix termcap.

The GNU version of the termcap library is available free as source code, for use in free programs, and runs on Unix and VMS systems (at least). You can find it in the GNU Emacs distribution in the files ``termcap.c'` and ``tparam.c'`.

This manual was written for the GNU project, whose goal is to develop a complete free operating system upward-compatible with Unix for user programs. The project is approximately two thirds complete. For more information on the GNU project, including the GNU Emacs editor and the mostly-portable optimizing C compiler, send one dollar to

    Free Software Foundation
    675 Mass Ave
    Cambridge, MA 02139

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