minicom 2.7-1 / usr / share / doc / minicom / term / README.termcap

1. Graphics with termcap.

Some terminals, such as most consoles on Unixes that run on IBM
compatible PC's, can display special line drawing characters.
If these characters map 1-to-1 to the IBM character set, you can just
use the '-l' (literal) flag when invoking minicom. If your
terminal cannot display the IBM characters directly, you should add
the 'as', 'ae' and 'ac' entries to your termcap.

The Linux console only maps 1-to-1 in a special mode. Therefore you need to
make a special termcap entry in /etc/termcap that initializes the
console on startup. For an example see the files in the termcap/ directory.
This defines a termcap entry called "mc".
To use this information instead of the normal 'console' information,
minicom has to be invoked with the '-t mc' option (meaning use TERM=mc
instead of the normal TERM environment variable).

And, in my /etc/profile I have added the lines:

        case "$TERM" in
          con*|linux)
                MINICOM="-l -m -con -tmc" ; export MINICOM
                ;;
        esac

So when I log in on the console I can use minicom in full color,
full ANSI mode.


2. About the included termcap files.

I've written some termcap entries for the VT family of terminals
from scratch. These entries are correct and solve the long-
standing "my arrow keys don't work!" etc. problems.

This is probably obsolete now the world is changing to terminfo.
Fortunately the master terminfo file is reasonably accurate.

There are two termcap files in this subdirectory, termcap.short
and termcap.long. You should only use termcap.long if your
library version is < 4.6.27 (it probably is). Newer libraries
have my new termcap code and won't break on the tc= entries
in termcap.short.

If you don't use exotic termcap entries you might just want to
copy the new termcap file over /etc/termcap (make a backup copy
first!). Otherwise you'll have to edit, cut and paste.