Hi Jason, * Jason Edwards <sub.mesa_at_gmail.com>, 20111122 21:56: > I wonder: is cons25 bugged or simply obsolete? Not that I want to keep > cons25; just being curious. There are two reasons why I changed the default terminal emulator to be xterm-like, instead of conforming to cons25: - It is more compatible. Not all operating systems have proper cons25 entries in their termcap/terminfo, meaning it is practically impossible to SSH to one of those systems and do your work properly. Also, there are many devices (e.g. Cisco/HP switches) that don't offer a lot of flexibility with respect to terminal handling. By using an xterm-style emulator, this is all solved, because xterm is pretty much compatible with VT100 and friends. - It is more bandwidth efficient. cons25-like terminals do not (have to) support more advanced features like scrolling regions. This means for example that if you use applications where only a portion of the screen scrolls (e.g. irssi, mutt), it has to redraw that entire portion of the screen, instead of being able to simply scroll that independent region, without affecting the rest of the display contents. This is of course no problem when running applications locally, but it does have its advantages when SSHing to another system. - It is more future proof. There are many implementations of xterm-like terminals that demonstrate that it's not hard to get (a sane subset of) UTF-8 and 256 colors working. Things like that are simply not available for cons25. As people pointed out, if you still want to keep on using TERM=cons25 (not advised, though), you _MUST_ either compile your kernel with TEKEN_CONS25 or run vidcontrol -T cons25. This is due to the fact that cons25-like terminals are incompatible with xterm-like terminals. For example: - With xterm, ^N and ^O are used to switch character maps, while with cons25, they render a music note and star symbol. - With xterm, processing backspace while the cursor is at the first column of the screen does nothing, while cons25 performs reverse line wrapping. - With xterm, ^L is interpreted as a newline, while with cons25, it clears the entire screen. - With xterm, line wrapping of the cursor on a display of n columns wide is only performed when printing the n+1'th character, while cons25 already does this after the n'th character. Effectively, this makes it very hard to print a character in the lower righthand corner of the screen. One of these incompatibilities is likely what caused the problems you experienced when you ran ee(1) without updating /etc/ttys accordingly. -- Ed Schouten <ed_at_80386.nl> WWW: http://80386.nl/
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