For several years, I have used in my interactive shells on BSD/OS and
NetBSD systems:

  if [ "X$TERM" = Xrxvt ]; then
    TERM=xterm
    export TERM
  fi

I noticed that the newer rxvt's aren't liking this when I login to a
remote Linux box then use vi. With vi I press "O" to insert a new line and
the screen is not redrawn, so I begin typing it appears to overwrite the
text. When I press escape and CTRL-L all is fine.

I didn't have this problem with using various versions of rxvt for several
years with TERM=xterm.

Anyways, now I removed all this from my sh profiles, expecting to just use
TERM=rxvt.

But TERM still is "xterm".

(So I see my old fix for TERM didn't matter anymore.)

The rxvt man page says this is defined by termName resource.

xrdb -query doesn't tell me anything. I don't have any .Xresources or
.Xdefaults.

rxvt -h tells me
Rxvt v2.7.10 - released: 26 MARCH 2003
Options:
XPM,transparent,utmp,menubar,frills,linespace,24bit,XIM,multichar_languages,scrollbars=rxvt+NeXT+xterm,Greek,XGetDefaults

And /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Rxvt doesn't define it.

This works for me:
echo "Rxvt.termName: rxvt" | xrdb

I don't want to create a .Xresources for this.

I see that the rxvt-2.7.10 source defaults to xterm (TERMENV in rxvt.h).


Anyways, does anyone else have problems with this?


By the way, it seems like I remember an rxvt mailing list. But I can't
find it anymore. Does anyone know of one?

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/