G'day Alexander,

I had read about terminfo, tput, and friends recently. What I found was that there are many variations depending on terminal type, and the manpages don't always get it right.

The manpage to which you linked, and the one on my system, seem to agree; at least with respect to numeric capabilities. Here's a selection (which I've doctored a bit for those with narrower screens than me):

    These are the numeric capabilities:

            Variable    Cap-      TCap   Description
             Numeric    name      Code
        columns         cols      co     number of columns in
                                         a line
        ...
        lines           lines     li     number of lines on
                                         screen or page
        ...
        max_colors      colors    Co     maximum number of
                                         colors on screen
        ...
[download]

Now consider these:

$ tput cols
120

$ tput lines
63

$ tput colors
8
[download]

The first two give absolutely correct results. The third is very wrong: I have 16,581,375 colours, not 8. Perhaps there's a better capability to use, but I don't know what that might be (and I'm certainly no expert — I've only been looking at these features very recently).

I didn't mention terminfo, tput, etc. to Discipulus because I'm unsure of the validity of the information and I don't even know if MSWin has them (or, if it does, perhaps they're under a different name).