z@cca.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman) (10/13/83)
CCA EMACS now supports the terminfo package written by Pavel Curtis as an alternative to termcap. Terminfo is similar to termcap, but it has two major advantages. First, it supports parameterized capabilities. This means that for terminals which support such capabilities, such as all Ansi terminals, terminal I/O can be noticeably reduced. For example, instead of deleting ten lines of text by sending out the "delete line" string ten times, a single string saying "delete ten lines" can be sent. The result of using terminfo with the already highly optimized CCA EMACS display code is that each terminal is supported as well as if it had a highly optimized driver written especially for it. The second major advantage of terminfo is that its database is compiled, which means that programs which use terminfo will start up faster. Additionally, the initialization sequence for user programs is simpler with terminfo than with termcap. The terminfo software is distributed free along with all distributions of CCA EMACS. The terminfo package includes documentation, so other programs may be written to use it as well. Since terminfo requires system privileges to install, CCA EMACS still uses termcap by default. However, adding one "#define" to the EMACS configuration file causes EMACS to use terminfo instead.