microsoft / microsoft/terminal
Eventually register a terminfo with ncurses upstream
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- C++
- Stars
- 105k
- Forks
- 9.6k
- Avg merge
- 3d 17h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 29
Description
Thomas Dickey, the maintainer of the ncurses project, also maintains the terminfo-db distributed with most Linux distributions. At the moment, the main TERM environment variable is xterm-256color, but not all xterm features are supported or even planned. When 1.0 releases, it would be good to leave xterm-256color as the default TERM environment, but also to maintain a separate terminfo with the ncurses project upstream. This means that as the changes in ncurses propagate down to the distros, the team can make a switchover and report the TERM as ms-terminal.
This will give the team the freedom in the long-term to add new features not implemented in xterm (for example, to support 32-bit color (i.e. an alpha channel)) or any other cool features they might dream up. Some projects like libvte and kitty have or previously had a bad relationship with the ncurses maintainer because they refused to submit their own accurate TERMINFO to the database.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
No file or test is named. Start by reviewing how Windows Terminal currently selects and reports the xterm-256color TERM value, then study ncurses terminfo submission requirements and the proposed ms-terminal entry. Done means an accurate terminfo is accepted upstream and the project has a defined path for a later TERM switch.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp
- Domain
- cli, operating-systems
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100