Re: Running mutt on Mac OS X
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On Friday, January 2 at 01:17 PM, quoth Joseph:
> I ended up using the iTerm because the screen seems to work better.
Ugh, seriously? I tried using iTerm but just found it to be waaaaay
too slow and finicky. My alternative to Apple's Terminal would be
xterm (because it works *exactly* the same as it does on every other
Unix, and it's blazing fast).
> Maybe someone can tell me what was wrong with the terminal app, but
> it would leave text all over the screen. Parts of previous emails
> would display etc as you moved around. It was very confusing.
There's nothing wrong with the *Terminal.app* program, per se, but
there's plenty wrong with your TERM setting. Terminal.app is NOT an
xterm, it is NOT an xterm-color, it is NOT an rxvt terminal, it is NOT
a dtterm terminal, even though it gives you all those options (and
more) in the Advanced tab of the terminal preferences. Most of those
options are close-enough that it works for MOST things, but mutt, more
than any other program I've ever played with, uses every single ounce
of a terminal's capabilities, and so is much more sensitive to
slightly-incorrect TERM settings. The correct value for the TERM
environment variable, for Apple's Terminal.app program, is "nsterm"
(from "NeXTStep Terminal", which is where the Terminal.app's ancestry
lies). Now, depending on your termcap database, even that is probably
slightly incorrect. For one thing, you probably won't get all the
right colors. Personally, the most accurate value I've found is
"nsterm-16color". But you'll run into additional trouble with that.
Get this: the nsterm-16color termcap file that comes with OSX (and
that came with ncurses up until very recently) has a bug in it. Not a
big one, but some of the commands in it are wrong.
This is in the mutt archives - I describe how to modify nsterm-16color
so that the Apple Terminal works perfectly:
http://marc.info/?l=mutt-users&m=118897291908291&w=2
> The Home/End key is another issue that iTerm seemed fixed able. I
> could never get it right in Terminal app.
That's easy to fix as well.
In Terminal.app, open up the Preferences (under the Terminal menu, or
press command-comma). Click on the "Settings" icon on the top of the
window that shows up. Pick your favorite terminal style in the column
on the left, and click on the "Keyboard" tab on the right. In that
list you can scroll to find all the keys you want to modify (end,
home, etc.). For each one, select it and edit it to change what it
does. By default, they're set to affect the scroll bar. If you'd
rather they emitted a character sequence (i.e. the way they do on
Linux), just tell it what character sequence to use. Here are the
correct ones:
end: \033[F
home: \033[H
page down: \033[6~
page up: \033[5~
The "\033" part is generated by pressing the escape key when typing in
a character sequence.
~Kyle
- --
Faith... must be enforced by reason. [...] When faith becomes blind it
dies.
-- Ghandi
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