The termcap manual: The termcap library and data base

by Richard M. Stallman

The Termcap Library is the documentation for Termcap, a library and database that enables programs to use display terminals in a terminal-independent manner. It originated in Berkeley Unix. The termcap database describes the capabilities of hundreds of different display terminals in great detail. Some examples of the information recorded for a terminal could include how many columns wide it is, what string to send to move the cursor to an arbitrary position (including how to encode the row and column numbers), how to scroll the screen up one or several lines, and how much padding is needed for such a scrolling operation.

The termcap library is provided for easy access this database in programs that want to do terminal-independent character-based display output. This manual describes the GNU version of the termcap library, which has some extensions over the Unix version. All the extensions are identified as such, so this manual also tells you how to use the Unix termcap. The GNU version of the termcap library is available free as source code.

This book is a printed version of the GNU termcap documentation, available online from the Free Software Foundation.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also uses the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. However, the distributors of these systems often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important.

That is why, since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

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