From 8b1246323f52121f9b647f6b052cd87bef73619e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Peter Stephenson Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 10:22:26 +0000 Subject: improve configuration handling of termcap/curses --- INSTALL | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 28 insertions(+) (limited to 'INSTALL') diff --git a/INSTALL b/INSTALL index ab5bc3760..03f8c08a8 100644 --- a/INSTALL +++ b/INSTALL @@ -304,6 +304,34 @@ corresponds to that of builtin widgets. See chapter 5 in the FAQ for some notes on multibyte input. +Terminal Handling +----------------- + +Historically, several different libraries have provided the features the +shell needs to provide output to the terminal. The most common have been +termcap, which is now largely outmoded, and curses, which supersedes +termcap and typically contains the same features as well as others. +configure will search for an appropriate library; the default search order +is "tinfo termcap ncurses curses" except on HP-UX and Solaris where it is +"Hcurses ncurses curses termcap". Note that even though termcap is usually +searched first zsh tries to make features from curses available and if the +curses library contains both curses and termcap features, as is normal, +the curses variant is used. ncurses is a newer version of curses +and tinfo is related to it. + +On some systems a suitable development package with a name such as +curses-devel or ncurses-devel needs to be installed before zsh can +be compiled. This is likely to be contained on any installation media, +or available for download. It is highly unlikely that you will need to +compile this from scratch. + +You can tell configure which libraries to search by passing an +argument via --with-term-lib. This takes a space-separated list +of libraries to try as its argument, so the default is equivalent to +--with-term-lib="tinfo termcap ncurses curses". It replaces the +old option --with-curses-terminfo, which altered the search order but +didn't allow an explicit search list to be passed. + Memory Routines --------------- -- cgit 1.4.1