keyname

[willett]

I'm enjoying using ncurses, which work great.  Question/bug report  
follows.

Am I understanding function keyname correctly?

It returns the internal variable name as a string.  That is, a  
program calling
   keyname(KEY_F1)

will return the string
   "KEY_F(1)"

But to be useful for a program presenting key prompts to a user,
the programmer would want this function to return a string like "F1".

Related issue, keyname does not seem to use the entries in terminfo
for key labels, eg
  lf1=
  lf2=
etc.  (Or, l1=, l2= in termcap).  These are described in "Termcap &  
terminfo"
 book as, e.g.,  "lf1=    The label on the first function key, if  
not F1."

I've written a routine to clean up the returned key labels, but I was
wondering if there's another ncurses function I'm missing, or if
this is the intended behavior, or I this might get changed in the
future.

Incidentally, my routine:
  1. Strips off the initial "KEY_"
  2. Strip out "(" and ")"
  3. If its in the range ([KEY_SBEG .. KEY_SUNDO] (except for  
[KEY_SELECT],
    then trim the S and put in place "Shift-".

Thus we get, for example, "F1" rather than "KEY_F(1)", and
"Shift-UNDO" rather than "KEY_SUNDO".
Do you think it would be desirable for keyname to behave more
like this?

Thanks,

Willett Kempton
Visible Software and
University of Delaware