My Monteverdi platform TUI view uses the tcell go library and it recognizes Ghostty with no problem, but today I discovered that mtr complains it doesn't recognize xterm-ghostty.

I see there's some consternation about Ghostty using its own terminfo and I feel like going ... well sonny, back in my day we had to echo terminfo into the amber 80x20 terminal CRT character by character with a lit match just to get BACKSPACE to work!

Anyway, yelling at cloud gets me nowhere. To get mtr to work I aliased it with an env var:

mtr: aliased to sudo TERM=xterm-256color mtr

But I agree with @mitchellh on that crazy issue thread. It's a terminal emulator and that's the whole fucking point of terminfo in the first place.

#ghostty #terminfo #terminalnerd

Previous post is an absolutely top-notch rant on the state of #terminfo. I can't even boost it without a mildly verbose followup:

I've mostly managed to avoid learning how any of this stuff works, except for an old weird workaround for rxvt-running-tmux years ago, and more recently, copying terminfo entries for newer terminals around. (Mostly `foot`, and `foot-extra`. I refuse to learn why there are two entries for a single, modern terminal emulator.)

The terminal-based LLM coding tools (claude code, opencode, gemini, pi, etc) are a pretty interesting new development. In my experience, there's been a slow shift away from terminal-based tools for decades. Now, suddenly, these new tools are trying to jam lots of GUI-like features into terminal apps.

My impression is that the amount of time spent in terminal emulators is increasing for the first time in years. (I could of course be wrong, and maybe the time is spent inside VS Code extensions and web UIs instead.)

When working with fancy terminal emulators (foot, kitty, Ghostty, etc.) over SSH, you may encounter glitches because of missing terminfo on the remote machine.

To fix it, you need to transfer your terminfo.

You can use the infocmp command to do that: https://spiffyk.cz/notes/#general-ssh-terminfo

#terminal #cli #terminfo #ghostty #kitty #foot #ssh

@kzimmermann

What does "control chars get printed" mean?

Because it could be two different things with two very different adjustments to make.

If it means control characters actually being printed as glyphs on the screen, taking it at face value, that's a /etc/wscons.conf and screen emulation settings thing; but if it is line editing not working then that's a TERM=netbsd6 and /etc/ttys affair.

#NetBSD #wscons #terminfo

There is a linux-16color terminal type in Dickey #terminfo. It has been there since 2009.

The #Linux KVT does not support more than the standard 8 colours, and some sleight of hand has been employed to get sort-of 16.

Unfortunately, the sleight of hand is broken.

If you've ever set TERM=linux-16colour and wondered at some strange scrolling and redraw artifacts, it is because the "op" capability doesn't undo the sleight of hand used by the setab/setaf capabilities.

#VirtualTerminals