1. If you have an alternate Terminfo database containing terminal types that are not available in the system default database /usr/share/lib/terminfo, you can specify the TERMINFO environment variable to point to this alternate database:

export TERMINFO=path

2. To specify a window width smaller than your screen width (for example, in situations where your communications line is slow), set the COLUMNS environment variable to the number of vertical columns you want between the left and right margins:

export COLUMNS=number

3. To specify a window height smaller than your current screen height (for example, in situations where your communications line is slow), override the LINES environment variable by setting it to a smaller number of horizontal lines:

export LINES=number

An integral type that holds an OR-ed set of attributes. The attributes acceptable are those which begin with the WA_ prefix.

Boolean data type.

A type that refers to a string consisting of a spacing wide character, up to 5 non-spacing wide characters, and zero or more attributes of any type. See Attributes, Color Pairs, and Renditions. A null cchar_t object terminates arrays of cchar_t objects.

An integral type whose values are formed by OR-ing an "unsigned char" with a color pair and with zero or more attributes. The attributes acceptable are those which begin with the A_ prefix and COLOR_PAIR(3XCURSES)

An opaque data type associated with a terminal's display screen.

An opaque data type associated with a terminal. It contains information about the terminal's capabilities (as defined by terminfo), the terminal modes, and current state of input/output operations.

An integral data type whose values represent wide characters.

An opaque data type associated with a window.

A screen is a terminal's physical output device. The SCREEN data type is associated with a terminal.

Window objects are two-dimensional arrays of characters and their renditions. X/Open Curses provides stdscr, a default window which is the size of of the terminal screen. You can use the newwin(3XCURSES) function to create others.

A window which has been created within another window (the parent window) and whose position has been specified with absolute screen coordinates. The derwin(3XCURSES) and subwin(3XCURSES) functions can be used to create subwindows.

A subwindow whose position is defined relative to the parent window's coordinates rather than in absolute terms.

A special type of window that can be larger than the screen. For more information, see the newpad(3XCURSES) man page.

A terminal is the input and output device which character-based applications use to interact with the user. The TERMINAL data type is associated with such a device.

The cursor can be placed anywhere in the window. Window and screen origins are (0,0).

A multi-column character cannot be displayed in the last column, because the character would appear truncated. Instead, the background character is displayed in the last column and the multi-column character appears at the beginning of the next line. This is called wrapping. If the original line is the last line in the scroll region and scrolling is enabled, X/Open Curses moves the contents of each line in the region to the previous line. The first line of the region is lost. The last line of the scrolling region contains any wrapped characters. The remainder of that line is filled with the background character. If scrolling is disabled, X/Open Curses truncates any character that would extend past the last column of the screen.

Overwrites operate on screen columns. If displaying a single-column or multi-column character results in overwriting only a portion of a multi-column character or characters, background characters are displayed in place of the non-overwritten portions.

Insertions and deletions operate on whole characters. The cursor is moved to the first column of the character prior to performing the operation.

Moves the cursor one column towards the beginning of the line. If the cursor was already at the beginning of the line, it remains there. All subsequent characters are added or inserted at this point.

Moves the cursor to the beginning of the current line. If the cursor was already at the beginning of the line, it remains there. All subsequent characters are added or inserted at this point.

When adding characters, X/Open Curses fills the remainder of the line with the background character (effectively truncating the newline) and scrolls the window as described earlier. All subsequent characters are inserted at the start of the new line. When inserting characters, X/Open Curses fills the remainder of the line with the background character (effectively truncating the line), moves the cursor to the beginning of a new line, and scrolls the window as described earlier. All subsequent characters are placed at the start of the new line.

moves subsequent characters to next horizontal tab strop. Default tab stops are set at 0, 8, 16, and so on. When adding or inserting characters, X/Open Curses inserts or adds the background character into each column until the next tab stop is reached. If there are no remaining tab stops on the current line, wrapping and scrolling occur as described earlier.

When X/Open Curses functions perform special character processing, they convert control characters to the ^X notation, where X is a single-column character (uppercase, if it is a letter) and writes that notation to the window. Functions that retrieve text from the window will retrieve the converted notation not the original.

In line input mode, the terminal driver handles the input of line units as well as SIGERASE and SIGKILL character processing. See termio(4I) for more information. In this mode, the getch() and getnstr() functions will not return until a complete line has been read by the terminal driver, at which point only the requested number of bytes/characters are returned. The rest of the line unit remains unread until subsequent call to the getch() or getnstr() functions. The functions nocbreak(3XCURSES) and noraw(3XCURSES) are used to enter this mode. These functions are described on the cbreak(3XCURSES) man page which also details which termios flags are enabled. Of the modes available, this one gives applications the least amount of control over input. However, it is the only input mode possible on a block mode terminal.

Byte/character input provides a finer degree of control. The terminal driver passes each byte read to the application without interpreting erase and kill characters. It is the application's responsibility to handle line editing. It is unknown whether the signal characters (SIGINTR, SIGQUIT, SIGSUSP) and flow control characters (SIGSTART, SIGSTOP) are enabled. To ensure that they are, call the noraw() function first, then call the cbreak() function.

This is the same as the cbreak() mode with a timeout. The terminal driver waits for a byte to be received or for a timer to expire, in which case the getch() function either returns a byte or ERR respectively. This mode overrides timeouts set for an individual window with the wtimeout() function.

This mode provides byte/character input with the most control for an application. It is similar to cbreak() mode, but also disables signal character processing (SIGINTR, SIGSUSP, SIGQUIT) and flow control processing (SIGSTART, SIGSTOP) so that the application can process them as it wants.

{, [, and ( represent the left halves of multi-column characters. }, ], and ) represent the corresponding right halves of the same multi-column characters.

Alphanumeric characters and periods (.) represent single-column characters.

The number sign (#) represents the background character.