Re: Terminal trouble

cothrige wrote:
* James Richardson (james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

I am not sure about rxvt, but with xterm you can set the titeInhibit
resource to true (e.g. add a line like XTerm*titeInhibit: True to your
.Xresources file), not sure it it works with rxvt. You may have to mess
with the terminfo database and remove the functionality of smcup and
rmcup, which of course correspond to the ti and te entries of termcap.


I do have the titeInhibit resource set to true, and it does help
xterm, though I don't really like xterm. Can't say why for certain,
though it does seem sort of slow and clunky to me. In the past, I
would also set Rxvt.termName to xterm and perhaps this helped to fix
the situation with rxvt, because for a long time I did not have this
problem. However, it hasn't had any impact this time and all my
terminals except xterm are carrying on in this way.

How does one go about changing the terminfo database? I have never
messed with that before. The two questions which really bug me right
now are why, in such a configurable and choices based system as Linux,
would this kind of "feature" be hardwired in and made virtually
unchangeable? And secondly, are there really people out there who
prefer this behaviour? It would easily make my top five list of
irritating features.

I don't know why it is the default, and I don't really know a lot of
people who prefer the behavior, although presumable the guy who made it
the default liked it. ;)

The easiest way to change the terminfo database is to decompile the
entry for your terminal, take out the the entries for rmcup and smcup,
and then recompile the entry.

1. How do I tell which termcap entry I am using?
The TERM environment variable contains the value. (echo $TERM). As I use
xterm, my entry is xterm.

2. Decompile the apropriate entry.
$infocmp xterm > /tmp/xterm

3. edit /tmp/xterm and remove the entry for rmcup and smcup.

4. recompile the new file. tic /tmp/xterm.
This will place a file in a directory .terminfo in your home directory.

5. You should now be able to start rxvt without the alternate screen.

6. Where to go next. If you want to make this your system default, you
need to copy the file (as root) into /usr/share/terminfo/... (for xterm
that would be /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm). If you don't want to make it
the system default, but available to users, just copy it somewhere into
/usr/share/terminfo... (like /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-special) and
have TERM set appropriately in .bashrc.

--
James Richardson

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