8 ms·

A lot more than it was 20 years ago? With multiplatform, CI/CD, cloud, Docker, etc. I spend way more of my time in a terminal than I used to.

• kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  I ignore terminfo and just stick to the general VT100 escapes + ANSI. You can expect any decent terminal emulator to deal with them correctly. It isn't worth trying to work with a crusty abstraction mechanism that doesn't offer much benefits today and is largely opaque and hard to manage.
  • serf 4y ago
    right, but the question was whether or not an understanding of terminfo would help general understanding behind the terminal and tty -- personally I think that still stands, even if you don't insist on using terminfo practically.
    • amelius 4y ago
      But how do you think the information in that book can be turned into practical use for the programmer that spends time in the terminal but doesn't need to write applications that work in (possibly) ancient terminals?
      • Beltalowda 4y ago
        It's useful if you want to write interactive applications from scratch ("curses-like"). Beyond that ... probably not so much.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Read ECMA-48 and DEC VT documentation. That will cover the bulk of what you need to know to operate a TTY style terminal. Terminfo is basically for smoothing over differences with terminal behaviors that aren't commonly used anymore. It only tells you there's a difference in capability. You still have to implement code to handle them which will never be invoked by anyone but a retro enthusiast plugging in obscure 70's hardware.