Installing a custom termcap on SDF is relatively easy. By default, on NetBSD, it will look for a ~/.terminfo.cdb termcap database in your home directory for any additional termcap entries not supported by default. You can generate this database by giving the tic command a folder with uncompiled (plain text) termcap entries. Also, remember that on most systems you can use the infocmp command to dump the terminal capabilities. So, say you wanted to copy your working termcap from another system to SDF, on the other system you could run: infocmp > myfancyterm.info and then scp/ftp/whatever your newly created myfancyterm.info to sdf and put it in ~/.terminfo/myfancyterm.info Put as many termcap .info files in ~/.terminfo as you want, and then finally compile the entire database with: tic ~/.terminfo this will generate a ~/.terminfo.cdb file and the next time you log and set your TERM= variable, things should "just work" (tm)