[SOLVED] irssi ncurses issues inside tmux

archtaku · 2011-06-07 16:37:25

Lately I have had issues with irssi, but only when running within a tmux window. They seem to match what was being described in this mailing ilst email on the libevent-users mailing list, though I haven't seen any further discussion on this topic in their archives.

Basically, what happens is when I have irssi running in a tmux window on a tall display (in xmonad I let it be the primary window and it has 84 lines), there seem to be redraw issues when I switch between irssi windows. Lines from other windows persist on the new window. Hitting Ctrl+l to redraw the screen only makes the problem worse. The statusbars disappear, and some of the text disappears as well. This doesn't happen, however, when my terminal has, say, 40 lines.

I use screen-256color for my TERM environment variable within tmux windows to get 256-color support. The TERM env variable is exported in my .bashrc based on whether or not the TMUX environment variable is nonzero length. I initially saw this weird behavior in irssi when I made this change to TERM. I had read that irssi doesn't play well with 256-color modes, so I changed the wrapper script that I use to launch irssi so that it includes the following:

TERM=xterm-color $(which irssi)

This worked well for a long time, but now the problem has cropped up again since Friday (3rd of June). I show no upgraded/installed packages since May 27th, which makes this all the more puzzling.

Is anyone else seeing this sort of behavior?

Last edited by archtaku (2011-06-07 21:46:04)

archtaku · 2011-06-07 17:42:16

UPDATE: I'm now seeing this issue in a 41-line window when I switch to and from the bitlbee control channel.

jasonwryan · 2011-06-07 18:31:38

I have no problems setting my tmux term to:

TERM=screen-256color

archtaku · 2011-06-07 20:18:36

Hmm... OK then, a few questions:

1) What terminal emulator are you using? I'm using rxvt-unicode.

2) Are you setting the TERM value manually, or using tmux' "default-terminal" config option?

3) What is your TERM outside of tmux?

jasonwryan · 2011-06-07 20:48:26

Does that not work for you?

1. urxvt
2. I set it manually:

[ -n "$TMUX" ] && export TERM=screen-256color

3.

echo $TERM
rxvt-unicode-256color

archtaku · 2011-06-07 21:39:41

Yeah, that's exactly what I was doing, but it wasn't working for me.

I found the issue, though. I'm using the nicklist plugin for irssi, but cat-ing the nicklist FIFO in a separate pane. Unloading the nicklist module and getting rid of the pane ended up fixing the issue. So there's apparently something amiss with the wrapper function I was using to load irssi and the nicklist FIFO pane all at once.

I swear it worked before though, I have no idea what on earth made it stop working abruptly. Nothing changed, in any of my config files. The only packages I can think of that could possibly have had any impact would be bash, perl, irssi, tmux, ncurses, or rxvt-unicode... none of which have been updated for weeks.

jasonwryan · 2011-06-07 21:44:55

archtaku wrote:

I swear it worked before though...

If I had a dollar...

Glad you got it sorted. Please mark your thread as [Solved]

Arch Linux

#1 2011-06-07 16:37:25

[SOLVED] irssi ncurses issues inside tmux

#2 2011-06-07 17:42:16

Re: [SOLVED] irssi ncurses issues inside tmux

#3 2011-06-07 18:31:38

Re: [SOLVED] irssi ncurses issues inside tmux

#4 2011-06-07 20:18:36

Re: [SOLVED] irssi ncurses issues inside tmux

#5 2011-06-07 20:48:26

Re: [SOLVED] irssi ncurses issues inside tmux

#6 2011-06-07 21:39:41

Re: [SOLVED] irssi ncurses issues inside tmux

#7 2011-06-07 21:44:55

Re: [SOLVED] irssi ncurses issues inside tmux

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