ncurses on macOS (OSX) cannot find xterm-256color

Question

I'm trying to use ncurses 6.0 on macOS. I've downloaded the project and built the C++ demo using the supplied makefiles. However, when I run the demo, I get the error:

Error opening terminal: xterm-256color.

This might be related: I do not have an x folder in my terminfo directory:

$ ls /usr/share/terminfo/
31  36  45  51  64  69  6e  73  78
32  37  4c  58  65  6a  6f  74  7a
33  38  4d  61  66  6b  70  75
34  39  4e  62  67  6c  71  76
35  41  50  63  68  6d  72  77

The demo works correctly on Debian.

---

The output of my configuration is:

** Configuration summary for NCURSES 6.0 20150808:

       extended funcs: yes
       xterm terminfo: xterm-new

        bin directory: /usr/local/bin
        lib directory: /usr/local/lib
    include directory: /usr/local/include/ncurses
        man directory: /usr/local/share/man
   terminfo directory: /usr/local/share/terminfo

** Include-directory is not in a standard location

---

Because I'm lazy and don't read manuals I did not run the full setup procedure. After running:

./configure
make
make install

It now works.

Answer 1

When you built ncurses, the configure script tells you at the end where it will install. If you give no options on OSX, it will look like this:

creating headers.sh

** Configuration summary for NCURSES 6.0 20160409:

       extended funcs: yes
       xterm terminfo: xterm-new

        bin directory: /usr/local/bin
        lib directory: /usr/local/lib
    include directory: /usr/local/include/ncurses
        man directory: /usr/local/share/man
   terminfo directory: /usr/local/share/terminfo

** Include-directory is not in a standard location

You can override the location of the terminfo directory (read the INSTALL file), or tell the library at runtime by setting the TERMINFO and/or TERMINFO_DIRS environment variables. But without doing one of those things, it will look for the terminal database in a different location.

The ncurses configure script supplies a --prefix=/usr option for some systems (mainly Linux-based) because it is expected to be the system curses library (again, read INSTALL ). OSX is not the odd one here.

OSX is different from the usual case: its filesystem (usually) ignores the difference between upper/lowercase names. The configure script checks for this, and if so, it compiles in a workaround to encode those single letters as a hexadecimal number. For example, 0x78 is "x".