Re: nano and TERM

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Sat, 5 Apr 2003 fergus at bonhard dot uklinux dot net wrote:

> > Hmm, unable to reproduce your problem here
> > so far, prehaps some more details would be useful.
> > Gareth - nano packaging type guy.
>
> Thank you for getting back to me. This is what I meant.
>
> When Cygwin is installed (i.e. after running setup, filesystems are mounted,
> registry entries are made, etc, etc) all the supplied applications (such as
> nano) operate very nicely in the default bash console window and, it turns
> out, in a rxvt window. I have experimented with the "-tn" terminal switch
> available with rxvt but to be honest have found most settings (e.g. -tn
> cygwin, -tn rxvt, -tn vt100; or no setting at all) to be completely
> irelevant: things just work. (Though I remember -tn linux turned out to be a
> doomed selection.) Well done all the packagers.
>
> Also, nano and pico and a few other things work seamlessly, and with no
> obvious differences, in a Windows DOS box. Especially the command-line stuff
> like ls, find, md5sum, diff, cmp, ... This is because I have put
> c:\Cygwin\bin in my Windows PATH (early). This offers a huge and valuable
> extension to the supplied Windows command structure.
>
> (I know http://www.nano-editor.org supply a zipped version of nano claimed
> to be "for Windows" but since on un-zipping the provision, it turns out to
> include cygwin1.dll, I deduce it's the same, ot not much different to, the
> entity maintained by Gareth. So, since nano works in all possible required
> environments that I can think of (Cygwin-bash, Cygwin-rxvt, Windows-DOS) I
> have not bothered with this zipped item.)
>
> My reason for writing was to report (very unclearly, I now perceive) the
> following.
>
> Occasionally it suits me to umount -A and also change the name c:\Cygwin to
> c:\SomethingElse. (Don't ask. I'm interested in sparse systems. Particularly
> in extending the Windows command structure through simply making available
> the contents of c:\SomethingElse\bin\, and *without* setting up Cygwin in
> the mounted registry sense.) It seems to me that as long as
> c:\SomethingElse\bin is in the Windows PATH, then one still has the luxury
> of Cygwin's applications. Certainly I find am still able to use ls, find,
> md5sum, cmp, diff, ..., loads of others, ..., and pico.
>
> I am more or less certain that I have successfully used nano in these
> circumstances. But currently I am getting the error message earlier
> described: "Error opening terminal : cygwin".
>
> Fergus
>
> P.S. I know. This is saying "Thank you for supplying an item intended to be
> used under prevailing circumstances A. I want to use it under prevailing
> circumstances B, but I find I can't. Kindly mend it so I can." I really am
> not saying this, and I hope I have no unreasonable expectations. But I guess
> what I am saying is: (a) I'm sure I could once, and (b) other not dissimilar
> things seem to work OK under prevailing circumstances B. Is there any
> possibility that nano could be looked at, because it is SUCH a useful
> editor. THANK YOU.

Fergus,

Any application depending on ncurses or curses will probably use the
terminfo database.  For that, it'll need access to /usr/share/terminfo,
and thus it'll need at least the "/" mount.  Alternatively, some older
applications use /etc/termcap (with the same requirement).  I doubt there
will be any resolution that will allow you to use a full-screen editor
without access to terminfo or termcap.

I'm not sure why pico works, possibly because it has an internal termcap
entry for a dumb terminal and uses that when the terminfo/termcap database
cannot be found.  This might have been the case with nano as well, but
then its (upstream) maintainers must have decided that terminfo/termcap
databases are always available, and that it makes sense to eliminate that
functionality.  If so, it's unlikely it'll be reinstated.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
  -- Leto II


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