Jeff Dean <jeff@aids-unix> (01/10/85)
Well, it looks like lots of us are having problems with the terminfo/curses distribution. There seem to be a bunch of problems with mille just in terms of keeping track of things on the screen. I found that with the terminfo version, the screen needs to be restored fairly often; I didn't have the same problem with the termcap version. As far as slowness goes, make sure you are using libncurses and not libdcurses. The latter writes out thousands of lines of debugging information, and is so verrbose to be almost useless. As another test of terminfo curses, I tested it with a progam called "plane" that appeared on this list not too long ago. The program is incredibly simply, yet terminfo curses fails to work properly with it. Since we're already running terminfo with some other software, I'm pretty certain the problem is with the curses part, and not with the terminfo part (or with our terminal descriptions). It's too bad so many of us went through all that trouble to collect and compile all that software, only to discover that it is useless.