I think the whole terminfo/termcap situation could be improved a lot. For one thing, most terminal emulators just report "xterm" or "xterm-256color" as the TERM environment variable, even though different terminals that report the same thing have different capabilities. A couple terminals, like alacritty and kitty, do ship with their own terminfo files, but that causes problems if you ssh to a box that doesn't have the terminfo file for that terminal.

It can definitely be improved. The model has some significant flaws. I started again from the fundamentals and came up with a rather different model for differentiating terminal capabilities.

* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TerminalCapab...

Note, in fairness, that not having the terminfo file is not a huge problem, as terminfo is designed so that one can transport information from one system to another, and place local database entries in one's home directory if necessary.

The Z shell takes xn to have a particular meaning, although not the one that it was supposed to have.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/167582/why-zsh-ends...

It was supposed to refer to a particular behaviour of Concept terminals. In practice, it is used in many terminfo records to denote DEC pending wrap, which the terminfo commentary even itself records as being different to the Concept glitch. Yes, terminfo has highly problematic paradigms that simply do not match how terminals and their emulators actually work.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691989

Regarding your second link, I cannot comment on the linked item as it has been archived by HN but as an additional reference for others and possibly a fun read for you: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=754596

I like your TerminalCapabilities project.

I'll see your GNOME and raise you Microsoft.

* https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/3177