terminfo

[Bruce Evans]

On Fri, 21 Feb 2014, Ian Lepore wrote:

> On Fri, 2014-02-21 at 10:35 -0800, John-Mark Gurney wrote:
>> Ian Lepore wrote this message on Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 08:46 -0700:
>>>
>>> All of that seems to assume that every terminal actually being used in
>>> the world today is either xterm or something that emulates it.  Try
>>> using vi on a serial console on an embedded ARM board and you'll get a
>>> quick frustrating lesson in how not-xterm a serial console is.  I've yet
>>> to find a combo of serial comms program and TERM setting that actually
>>> works well and lets you edit a file with vi.
>>
>> Have you used screen?
>>
>> screen /dev/ttyXXX 9600
>>
>> It's pretty much the only serial console program I use because I use
>> screen, and remebering how to use tip/cu w/ a new random USB serial
>> device is anoying...
>
> screen is what I finally settled on as the least-horrible option, but it
> barely works for anything except scrolling text and typing command
> lines.  Anything fullscreen works a bit and fails a bit in different
> ways with different TERM= values.

I used it a bit over 20 years (just for local shells) but was happy
to rmrf it.  IIRC, it used curses, at least back them, and had slow
screen refresh and/or scrolling and display artifacts.  (I am sensitive
to these and wasn't happy until the average scrolling speed reached a few
hundred thousand lines per second (this happens partly virtually in
syscons)).  Virtual ttys work better for text displays and xterms work
better for bitmapped displays.

> I've never used cu, forgot it even exists, but several people have
> mentioned it, so I'll give it a try.  I tend to shy away from
> 1980s-vintage tools because they're so... 1980s.  (tip, for example, is
> just an abomination).

tip is too bloated for me, though I sometimes miss its ability to send a
line break.

I don't know what you are doing to for TERM to not just work.  I can
barely see the difference between a serial tty login and an ssh login.
Serial logins at only 115200 bps are a bit slow, but so are
intercontinental ssh's to freefall.

Bruce