Termcap
Termcap is a library and database that enables programs to use display terminals in a terminal-independent manner. The origins of this library are from the Operating system, Berkeley Unix
The termcap database describes the capabilities of hundreds of different display terminals, which allows external programs to be able to have character-based display output, independent of the type of terminal. Emacs is a popular program that takes advantage of termcap.
Examples of what the data base describes:
- 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
- how much padding is needed for such a scrolling operation.