On 9/10/07, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
quoted text
> Hello,
>
> I have a box that runs OpenBSD that sshes into my Debian box.  On
> OpenBSD, the default colour term is vt220 so when I ssh to debian, TERM
> is set to vt220.
>
> When I run mc, all is well; colour, line draw, whatever.
>
> When I run lynx or mutt, I get black on white with no colour.  On Lynx
> this means that my blue on gray ends up as white on black; with mutt I
> don't get the blue top and bottom lines or the red thread lines.
>
> If I ssh in from an xterm, with TERM=xterm, everything is fine.

termcap/termlib db's are different between openbsd and debian.
curses implementations are different between openbsd and debian.

some apps (like vim off the top of my head?), don't use
termcap/termlib or curses, they got their own thing going on. They
read TERM and do their own capabilities on it. Terminals lie (You're
not using a vt220 afterall, are you?), and terminal capabilities lie.
There are kilo's of documentation for termincal capabilities and
sequences out there, and they conflict each other.

curses has a .hascolor() boolean apps will read. You can print colors,
but curses will snuff them if .hascolor() returns false. I've seen
xterm-color return false, but xterm-256color return true! what??

Anyway, wsvt25 from console works great from openbsd on openbsd. If
you're on net and freebsd, pcvt25 works fairly well. Logging into
linux, I generaly use vt220 or vt102.

keep these aliases handy:
alias vt220='export TERM=vt220; tset -I -Q'
alias vt102='export TERM=vt102; tset -I -Q'
alias wsvt25='export TERM=wsvt25; tset -I -Q'
alias pcvt25='export TERM=pcvt25; tset -I -Q'
alias xterm256='export TERM=xterm-256color; tset -I -Q'
alias xtermcolor='export TERM=xterm-color; tset -I -Q'