urxvt termName

miggy · 2008-02-12 02:30:06

This is by no means dire, it's mostly that I'm just curious.

I often ssh into a (old?) unix machine. My terminal of choice is urxvt however, on the unix machine it reports: Type rxvt unknown. If I try to less something it pops up with a bunch of warnings about not being able to clear this and that and some other things. I just have to press a key to go past these things and then forward browsing is okay but if I move back things are like mirror flipped upside down as though the bottom line is the top line and the top line is the bottom line.

If I put in my Xdefaults urxvt.termName: xterm then everything works fine (at least everything that I do). However, I occasionally get similar warning on my local machine in this case--things about lacking functionality I believe. I'm wondering what I might do to to fix this. Perhaps somehow let the machine see the terminal it wants to see...or i could just actually use xterm.

thanks
miggy

dschrute · 2008-02-12 02:58:07

When you login to the remote/Unix system, couldn't you just do a export TERM=xterm as soon as you login ? Not exactly ideal, but it should work.

You should also look at the -tn option for (u)rxvt...It sets the TERM variable. maybe setup either an alias or shortcut to launch urxvt with the TERM variable set to xterm, only when you're going to connect to that system, and launch with defaults all the other times.

thayer · 2008-02-12 03:56:35

I've had this happen to me in the past... i think all you need to do is specify the term type on the server-side;e.g. in a .bashrc file.

miggy · 2008-02-12 04:24:15

Yep, that works. Thanks guys, that was simple enough.

phrakture · 2008-02-12 05:11:15

Ick. Rule of thumb: if you're manually setting TERM, it's a bad idea. There are cases where it works, but as a general rule, just don't do it.

The proper solution is to push the terminfo of your terminal to the server. There is a user dir for terminfo that works well for this.

ssh remote-host mkdir -p .terminfo/r/
scp /usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt-unicode remote-machine:.terminfo/r/

miggy · 2008-02-12 06:24:26

i honestly didn't have high hopes for my post but now i've actually learned something. thanks.

miggy · 2008-02-12 19:32:44

nice, works. for anyone curious, i had to compile the rxvt-unicode.terminfo on the remote machine it didn't like my binary. i couldn't find the file anywhere on my FS or on the internet but did find infocmp (compare or print out terminfo descriptions)

phrakture · 2008-02-12 20:22:08

Ah yeah, if you're going from different distros, the formats may be different, so you'd need to use infocmp to dump rxvt-unicode, then tic to compile it on the target machine.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-02-12 02:30:06

urxvt termName

#2 2008-02-12 02:58:07

Re: urxvt termName

#3 2008-02-12 03:56:35

Re: urxvt termName

#4 2008-02-12 04:24:15

Re: urxvt termName

#5 2008-02-12 05:11:15

Re: urxvt termName

#6 2008-02-12 06:24:26

Re: urxvt termName

#7 2008-02-12 19:32:44

Re: urxvt termName

#8 2008-02-12 20:22:08

Re: urxvt termName

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