>>6
Yeah. For some reason, outputting terminal control codes directly from an application (i.e. not through some library) is considered dirty by younger Unix types. IMO this has nothing to do with Linux though; xterm is xterm regardless of particulars.

I guess most of us took a look at what's inside termcap and lost a few points of sanity to the ghosts of perverse old VT100 variant terminals that perhaps someone was still using in the mid-eighties.