Why use terminfo instead of extensible termcap?
Several reasons: • there is no standard for termcap. That is a drawback to developing applications using termcap. Amusingly enough, many of the termcap capabilities in common use now are defined in terms of terminfo, much like the inch is defined in terms of a centimeter. • terminfo supports conditional expressions. • ncurses terminfo is extensible anyway. It has been since 1999. If you give the -x option to tic, it compiles additional information which may be in the terminal description, using the syntax to determine types. If -x is omitted, tic warns about the unrecognized information. As an example of how this extensibility feature can be used, consider the case of OpenQM, whose developers copied more than 1000 lines of ncurses library code into their application to support some extended terminal capability features.
