Re: [Bug-zile] Mac Terminal.app problems: TERM=nsterm FTW

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Reuben,

On 15 Aug 2011, at 01:18, Reuben Thomas wrote:
> So, with ncurses 5.9, everything works for me with TERM=nsterm. This
> suggests that the FAQ entry for Mac should simply add "if you'd also
> like screen switching to work, install ncurses 5.9 or later and build
> Zile against that." It would be possible to provide a download link
> for a fixed nsterm terminfo file, but that's actually more complicated
> than simply rebuilding Zile for a user who must have already built
> Zile.

After half-a-day of experimentation and installing/uninstalling of
various combinations of Zile, luacurses and ncurses to run under iTerm
and Terminal.app, I realised everything is even simpler than the above
after all!!

I am currently experiencing 2 problems:

  1. F1-F4 don't register in C Zile.

     That's because I inherited my Terminal.app settings from some
     older more broken version of Terminal.app.  Yes, the xterm-color
     entry is still broken, but xterm-256color and xterm (and to a
     lesser degree) nsterm all behave moderately well.  And the key
     is that new installations will be set to xterm-256color, which
     Zile can see F1-F4 sequences from correctly.

  2. C-h registers as a BACKSPACE in C Zile.

     I see this only in C Zile but in all xterm variants, although
     but not nsterm.  But, this is actually a bug in Zile, which I
     fixed in Lua Zile some time ago with ba8dd42.  So Lua Zile
     doesn't exhibit this problem anymore, and I think a port of
     that fix to master would likely solve it there too.

Conclusion:

  1. New users will get TERM=xterm-256color by default, and by then
     the C-h bug should be fixed in C Zile too.
  2. People who have been migrating their settings across releases
     for a while and still have their terminal set to xterm-color,
     can be told to choose xterm-256color to fix things.
  3. No need for brew Formulae nor relinking against a different
     version of ncurses.
  4. Party!

Sorry it took so long for me to gather my thought processes coherently
enough to realise all of this.  But we got there in the end :)

> If you want to make life even simpler, write a brew recipe for Zile
> which depends on ncurses. No configure messing about, and no impact on
> other platforms, while making it much easier for just anyone to
> install Zile on Macs.

Although they are not terribly useful in the light of my earlier
revelations, it was creating and testing these Homebrew Formulae
that made me realise where I'd been going wrong.  For posterity:

  https://raw.github.com/gvvaughan/homebrew-alt/alternate/versions/ncurses59.rb
  https://raw.github.com/gvvaughan/homebrew-alt/alternate/duplicates/zile.rb

I'll probably continue to use the latter to maintain a build of C Zile
from the head of master in /usr/local for bug triage purposes:

  $ brew install -v --HEAD \
    https://raw.github.com/gvvaughan/homebrew-alt/alternate/duplicates/zile.rb

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)