Mark Jamsek:

> > > + * Extract visible substring of line y from the curses screen
> > > + * and strip trailing whitespace. If vline is set and locale is
> > > + * UTF-8, overwrite line[vline] with '|' because the ACS_VLINE
> > > + * character is written out as 'x'. Write the line to file f.
> > > + */
> 
> The locale is only relevant in this case because we only use the ACS_*
> characters when in a utf8 locale--

Why?  That doesn't make sense.  The ACS feature in ncurses is
specifically designed to exploit a feature of the DEC VT100 and its
successors that has been available since 1978, well before UTF-8.
ncurses has some fallback code that uses ASCII replacement characters
if the termcap/terminfo entry doesn't enable ACS.

> > Yes, you should use a standardized $TERM.  I mean what happens for
> > TERM=dumb?  I'm not sure what a good choice is.  "xterm" feels like
> > a moving target.
> 
> I was going back and forth on this and ultimately went the other way!
> But I'm happy to defer to your better judgement on this; "dumb" seems to
> work so maybe run with that?

Huh, I thought curses would refuse to work with "dumb"!
The problem is finding some sort of stable, generally available
terminal type.  "vt220"?

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de