Re: PuTTY tips for Debian users
Hi Stephen,
I've enjoyed reading your well-written and thoroughly researched posts. Have
you considered putting them somewhere else, e.g. the Debian wiki?
One point:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 10:11:41PM -0400, Stephen Powell wrote:
> One of the things I recommended was setting the terminal type string to
> xterm-utf8.
I asked myself "why"? Reading your original message, this is because this
enables a) xterm window title strings and b) non-VT100 box drawing characters.
So there's two plusses, but
> In particular, the "--color=auto" option of the "ls" command behaves
> sub-optimally. In wheezy, some of the colors, such as red, don't display.
> In an up-to-date jessie system, no color output occurs at all.
One minus,
> The problem is that xterm-utf8 is not listed in the dircolors internal
> database of terminal types that support color. It should be.
Who says it should be? I don't mean to be combative, I just wonder who has
authority over the definition of 'valid' TERM values. Where did xterm-utf8 come
from? Which software specifically supports it? Evidently dircolors doesn't.
>From what I can tell, dircolors has it's own private database, but much other
software uses 'terminfo', which in practice is part of ncurses nowadays.
Looking at ncurses in sid, I see there is an xterm-utf8 definition there.
Is the fact putty can't handle vt100 line drawing characters in UTF8 mode
a font problem perhaps? Would using a different font be a better solution?
What results do you get if you try a different TERM value, such as
xterm-256color? With that, at least, you'd have the benefit of 8 bit colour
options too.
For reference, here's the internal DB for dircolors/ls/coreutils
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/dircolors.hin
And here's the master DB for terminfo in ncurses:
http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/ncurses.git/tree/misc/terminfo.src
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