On 12/06/16 14:23, Gene Heskett wrote:
On Sunday 12 June 2016 06:00:03 Martin Read wrote:If ncurses programs that other people use without incident are screwing up the contents of your terminals, my first port of call would be checking that the value of the TERM environment variable matches reality.Hummm. That echo's as "echo $TERM" as "xterm", but my favorite is Terminal Emulator 4.8, and its help says "Xfce Terminal Emulator".
Hm, I've got xcfe4-terminal installed, let me try that out... OK, that appears to set TERM to xterm here (fairly normal for GUI terminal emulators), and aptitude's interactive mode behaves perfectly in it.
I confess to being completely baffled. The only times I can remember having ncurses programs behave badly in my terminals is when either (a) they crash, usually because I wrote them and haven't finished debugging them or (b) something I backgrounded without redirecting its output decided to emit some gerbil spew to stdout/stderr, meaning the cursor is no longer where ncurses thinks it is.
Found xterm but it opens a window about 2.75"x3.5", and uses a text font so small it gets 80 columns out of that 3.5", so its almost unreadable, and has no configuration menus at all over and above what I can do to it thru the tde configuration facility, which offers no way to change that microscopicly tiny font.
xterm *does* have a configuration menu, it's just hidden behind a rather obscure (and painfully "vintage X11") UI gesture. (Control + right-drag).