[Package Request] - Ghostty Terminfo

[philnichol]

What package is missing from Amazon Linux 2023? Please describe and include package name. Ghostty terminfo under /usr/share/terminfo (the ghostty entry).

Is this an update to existing package or new package request? New (terminfo entry only, not the terminal emulator itself).

Is this package available in Amazon Linux 2? If it is available via external sources such as EPEL, please specify. Unsure

Any additional information you'd like to include. (use-cases, etc) As Ghostty gains popularity as a modern GPU-accelerated terminal, we would like its terminfo profile supported by default in AL2023. Without it, users connecting from Ghostty can encounter incorrect rendering or key handling until they set envvars to fix it. Currently, we work around this by running tic against the Ghostty terminfo as part of our AMI builds.

Adding the terminfo entry by default would improve compatibility with no runtime cost, similar to how there's already an entry for alacritty and other terminal emulators

Related links:

• https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo

Thanks in advance!

[alexey-tsvetnov]

In my opinion, a support of a new and fancy terminal emulator doesn't look like a super critical feature that should be added everywhere as the main intent. I personally use it and like it a lot, but... despite the fact that it's written in a very cool Zig programming language, it's pretty fast and also created by a well known and respectful developer, adding support of all cool terminal emulators, shells, editors, etc won't make a solid, stable and reliable distribution. More over, Ghostty works just fine in most cases with the xterm-256color.

Anyway, there seems to be a better option. As it's mentioned on the Ghostty's web-site:

Ghostty's terminfo entry is available in ncurses 6.5-20241228 and above. As distros update their
ncurses packages, Ghostty's terminfo entry will be available by default system-wide.
This will take time to propagate.

I think, this is a more appropriate way to bring the new record to the system. Currently, AL2023 ships ncurses 6.2 (ncurses-6.2-4.20200222.amzn2023.0.6)

This is the patch, where Ghostty's terminfo record was added: https://invisible-island.net/archives/ncurses/6.5/ncurses-6.5-20241228.patch.gz

I'll ask the team that owns it to evaluate if it's feasible to patch the currently shipped ncurses package.

[philnichol]

@alexey-tsvetnov you are right, ncurses update is probably the best way forward. Good spot, can't believe I missed it from the link I posted 😬, and thanks for looking into this.