FPtermcap entry for OS/X Terminal (was 'Difference in how declared variables handled in report breaks?')

[Bruce Easton]

On 11/24/14, 7:19 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> PS: Anyone got a good, tight FPtermcap entry for OS/X Terminal? :-) 

Tight?   No.  For me, Jay, it's been a tale of mystery and intrigue, but 
mostly mystery.  I think some of the mystery lies with the files the 
target OS holds that control the terminal experience, and in other cases 
the version of filepro seems to make a difference.  (So far, I'm 
speaking of differences when filepro's termcap file remains unchanged.)

One of our clients has an old Fedora RH box with 5.0.14, where the 
original termcap entries for Linux and xterm came from the install. When 
I started using a mac to support them, the only changes necessary to the 
mac Terminal was to declare terminal as xterm, use Latin-US (DOS) text 
encoding and check 'Delete sends Control-H'. That's it - the function 
keys worked mostly fine, but I did have to change some of mac's 
pre-mission-control 'exposé' program key mappings so that they wouldn't 
supersede filepro for the higher-numbered function keys.  Those are the 
keys that would zoom your desktop in and out in various ways.

Since then, on target machines where 5.0.14 was installed, but on newer 
Linux, for instance, things would look OK, but the function keys would 
not work.  Swapping termcaps with one that would work for me on an older 
machine seemed to show that the problem was not the termcap.  Prior to 
using vmware, when I had this problem and was getting tired of rebooting 
just to bring up putty in windows on the mac, I started  rummaging 
around in the client's newer Linux OS terminal files and came across 
this file called "mn" which I think had a comment about it as "mac New" 
inside it.  So I tried setting TERM to xterm as usual, then I added "mn" 
to fp's termcap entry for xterm in its header (..|mn|..), then I set 
PFTERM to mn and exporting that, and then the function keys worked.  
Most of the newer Linux boxes (where 5.0.14 or earlier is running) these 
additional steps on the target box.

Lastly, since I think about 5.6 or 5.7, something changed in filepro 
itself I believe.  Maybe something was restored to it's original state. 
I'm only guessing, but the reason I say this is because, under a brand 
new install of filepro, I now see that things work fine without 
PFTERM=mn, even if I substitute one of my original termcaps in place of 
the one from the new install.

So maybe an easy way to look at what I would still do is to go with the 
steps from my second paragraph, and then if necessary, on the particular 
target machine, also try what I have in the third paragraph regarding "mn".

I think in a couple of cases, where I didn't want to change the client's 
termcap, I've copied it, modified it with "mn" and then for my session 
set the TERMCAP env var.

Hopefully someone has an easier solution.

Bruce