[ On Saturday, August 2, 2003 at 05:22:06 (-0700), Bruce J.A. Nourish wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Getting TERM right
>
> As you guessed later, wscons on a vga card. To tell the truth, I've never
> heard of anyone using anything different (except when working over a
> serial port with a modem or null-modem cable). In fact, I've never even
> seen a "terminal," except in a picture of the PDP that UNIX was written 
> (with a well bearded dmr sitting in front). I guess I'm a bit young for
> that :-).

Well now do I ever have a deal for you!  ;-)

Note that even NetBSD itself has only recently begun to unify the
console terminal emulator used on workstation-like systems such as PCs,
alphas, suns, etc.

> I figured vt100 had no color, but I find the whole termcap system
> rather arcane and slightly confusing: so I was bieng throrough.

I'd probably still be using my real VT100s for serial consoles but they
either do Xon/Xoff flow control and/or drop characters even at 9600 bps.
They are, after all, being driven by a measly old 8080 CPU with, IIRC, a
polled UART for I/O.

(I do regularly still use my at&t 605 -- it's the console terminal on my
terminal server and I have a few at&t DMDs that I still like to use but
they're rather large and somewhat heavy and I don't have room for one on
my desk at the moment)

> Any particular reason? Are you a cat person?

yeah, something like that.  ;-)  (see the X-Mailer header in my message)

truth be told I've also (tried to) read the mutt source code and found
it to be too poorly implemented to trust it with my e-mail.

(Mutt is better than many other MUAs, e.g. elm, mush, etc., all of which
I have in fact used in days gone by....  :-)

(Mutt is almost infinitely better written than some even more commonly
used code that people mangle their e-mail with, e.g. procmail.)

(I'm still not sure which of Pine and Mutt are better, but since I
rarely ever need to use either, I don't really care.  :-)

> mutt uses the system curses library to do the drawing. You'd probably
> know more about libcurses than I. My default background color is black
> (I don't even know if that could be changed.)

I had understood from your first message that the main problem you had
with using TERM=wsvt25 was when the background colour was not black so
I'm not sure what you meant when you said "when the background colour
was not black".

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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