New Terminal "feature"

G

genecutl

Registered
With the Panther upgrade, something has changed with Terminal.app. When I display a file using more, less, man, or similar utils, the displayed text disappears when the program ends (e.g. pressing 'q' in man). I've seen this in linux terminals and it's always bugged the hell out of me, and now my lovely OS X Terminal is doing this same annoying thing. Anyone know how to turn this "feature" off?
 
DJHyp3rion said:
it might be ur not using the tsch prompt (default in 10.2), but the bash prompt (default in Panther)
Click to expand...

Nope, I'm still using tcsh, though it happens the same in either shell.
 
I'm not sure how you'd turn it off, but you could possibly get around it by opening a new window...
 
What would opening a new window do?

At any rate, I was encountering compatibility problems with my school's SSH server, specifically trying to run pine with the default setting of xterm-color. I changed it to plain old xterm, and now all compatiblity problems are gone... try changing the terminal type in the preferences and see if that helps.
 
Opening a new window would allow him to run a new shell process while still being able to view the results from the displayed text.
 
Opening a new window doesn't solve the problem. For example, if you read a man page that's several screens long, you cannot scroll backward to review what you've read. Each new page erases the last.

There must be a setting to change this.
 
They must have changed the TERMINFO definition for the terminal. The terminfo database is used to describe/define which types of attributes various terminal types have, and how to access them. Some terminal types (like xterm) have the ability to switch between two different screen buffers. Programs like vi, more, and man take advantage of this and switch to the alternate buffer when they run. This is how xterm works on many unix systems. Apple must have added this capability to the terminal. Some people really like this "feature", some think it's a pain in the @ss.

The only way to get around this might be to set your terminal type to something that doesn't have this capability - something relatively dumb like 'TERM=vt100'. (I don't have access to my Mac right now, so I haven't tried this.)
 
tony said:
The only way to get around this might be to set your terminal type to something that doesn't have this capability - something relatively dumb like 'TERM=vt100'. (I don't have access to my Mac right now, so I haven't tried this.)
Click to expand...

Well, in Terminal Preferences you can change the terminal type with a popup menu. I changed it to VT100 and now it keeps the scrollback buffer exactly like it used to. Problem fixed.

Chris
 
All of a sudden, my delete key in pico behaves as a forward delete key when I ssh to other servers using the terminal.

I had problems with pico going from 10.1 to Jaguar also.

Why does this happen, and how do I fix it?
 
Well, mine's always ben pretty random (10.2); sometimes when I use 'top' it retains the text above the command prompt, sometimes not, ditto for manpages...
 
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