How does TERM=dumb support work?

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 18:08 +0200, Carsten Mattner wrote:
> > there a reason 9term doesn't export reasonable terminfo for its capabilities?
> 
> 9term is not a terminal "emulator" and therefore doesn't emulate
> old terminals

Nonsense. A "terminal" was a dedicated machine, with its own screen and
keyboard, whereas a "terminal emulator" like xterm or 9term is simply an
application giving the appearance of such a terminal in a window
system. 

9term just happens to emulate the simplest of terminals, namely a
typical early 1970s-era dumb terminal, which itself emulated a 1960s-era
teletype printer (aka TTY) with no cursor addressing beyond what's
present in ASCII (CR, LF, BS, tab) so terminfo and curses are
irrelevant. On top of that, they've added UTF-8 support and mouse
cut-and-paste. 9term actually does handle one escape sequence though: it
copied xterm's title-setting code.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.