6.5. Colours and Cursor Movement With tput

As with so many things in Unix, there is more than one way to achieve the same ends. A utility called tput can also be used to move the cursor around the screen, get back information about the status of the terminal, or set colours. man tput doesn't go into much detail about the available commands, but Emilio Lopes e-mailed me to point out that man terminfo will give you a huge list of capabilities, many of which are device independent, and therefore better than the escape sequences previously mentioned. He suggested that I rewrite all the examples using tput for this reason. He is correct that I should, but I've had some trouble controlling it and getting it to do everything I want it to. However, I did rewrite one prompt which you can see as an example: Section 12.8 .

Here is a list of tput capabilities that I have found useful:

tput Colour Capabilities

tput setab [1-7]: Set a background colour using ANSI escape
tput setb [1-7]: Set a background colour
tput setaf [1-7]: Set a foreground colour using ANSI escape
tput setf [1-7]: Set a foreground colour

tput Text Mode Capabilities

tput bold: Set bold mode
tput dim: turn on half-bright mode
tput smul: begin underline mode
tput rmul: exit underline mode
tput rev: Turn on reverse mode
tput smso: Enter standout mode (bold on rxvt)
tput rmso: Exit standout mode
tput sgr0: Turn off all attributes (doesn't work quite as expected)

tput Cursor Movement Capabilities

tput cup Y X: Move cursor to screen location X,Y (top left is 0,0)
tput sc: Save the cursor position
tput rc: Restore the cursor position
tput lines: Output the number of lines of the terminal
tput cols: Output the number of columns of the terminal
tput cub N: Move N characters left
tput cuf N: Move N characters right
tput cub1: move left one space
tput cuf1: non-destructive space (move right one space)
tput ll: last line, first column (if no cup)
tput cuu1: up one line

tput Clear and Insert Capabilities

tput ech N: Erase N characters
tput clear: clear screen and home cursor
tput el1: Clear to beginning of line
tput el: clear to end of line
tput ed: clear to end of screen
tput ich N: insert N characters (moves rest of line forward!)
tput il N: insert N lines

This is by no means a complete list of what terminfo and tput allow, in fact it's only the beginning. man tput and man terminfo if you want to know more.