On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Richard S. Crawford wrote: > > And behold, Peter Jay Salzman flailed at a keyboard and did expound: > > > export TERM=linux > > That didn't work, but: > > export TERM=xterm > > worked just fine.
In the beginning, there were toggle switches, but there was much rejoicing when electric typewriters were connected to the computer by RS-232 serial connections. The platen did return to the beginning of the line, and did advance to the next line, but the paper did tend to feed wrong when the platen were rolled the wrong way, so line-up motions were avoided. But confusion did spread over which codes should mean what when more than two codes were used. Amid this babel, did ASCII come to be by the cooperation and agreement of companies willing to send engineers to meetings in boring places. And while many codes were defined, many others were not, and a broom called the "ESCape" code was defined to sweep these arguments under the rug. So with the invention of the Video Display Terminal and the truck-sized hole called ESC began the proliferation of terminals programmed to do everything but brew coffee (that came later). Lo, but many of these new features were indeed the same, though triggered by different codes, so with many expletives programmers tried to build a unified way to invoke these features, using a database on the computer keyed by the "terminal type", and for awhile terminals did continue to proliferate. Among this babel, one common code was adopted to cause the terminal to tell the computer what its type is, and thus did the memory of how the babel were tamed begin to fade. Then came the X server, a terminal so powerful it was part of a computer, and could pretend to be more than one terminal at a time using software, and so was born xterm and its offspring. With this came the use of networks, still pretending to be serial connections, so that it became unclear indeed which computer were doing what. So by choice of xterm or one of its children, or settings thereof, the pretense is begun, and passed to the computer, which might or might not be the same one that the X server is running on. If vi does not find the terminal type, it is because the name it spoke when asked was not in the database on the computer running vi. The terminal "cygwin" is most likely a superset of the "xterm" terminal command set, so if the computer is told that the terminal is xterm then some minimal functionality may be used. Lo, but the right and proper way is to add "cygwin" to the database on the computer running vi. [1] --- [1] http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2000-08/msg00781.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Newmiller The ..... ..... Go Live... DCN:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Basics: ##.#. ##.#. Live Go... Live: OO#.. Dead: OO#.. Playing Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries O.O#. #.O#. with /Software/Embedded Controllers) .OO#. .OO#. rocks...1k --------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech