busybox vi doesn't use ncurses?

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 07:03:26PM -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > We use ANSI escape sequences, a standard which is over 20 years old and is 
>  > loosely based on the old VT100 escape sequences from the "glass tty" style 
>  > terminals DEC sold for use with its PDP computers, which is the original 
>  > platform that Unix emerged from 35 years ago.  DOS 3.x could handle these 
>  > just fine, and any modern OS that can't is too brain-damaged to care about.  
>  > (Feel free to come up with an example; I'll stand by my statement.)
> 
> hmm.  i guess the ADM-3A terminal in my cellar won't qualify as a
> "modern OS", eh? ;-)  because it sure ain't ANSI.

You can run screen on it and then bb's vi should work just fine from
inside screen. All screen needs is termcap/info, not curses itself
which is stupid bloatware. It would actually be nice if bb could
include an optional small termcap library with support for multiple
terminals, and use some preprocessor hacks to make it fall back to the
vt100-only support if that's disabled.

Also a big part of the problem is ncurses, not curses itself.
Implementing XSI curses standard should be very small if the person
who's writing it is competent at optimizing for size.

Rich