Is it possible to run dvtm on FreeBSD (with a sane terminal) ?

Question

Is it possible to run dvtm on FreeBSD (with a sane terminal) ?

rsyncnet opened this issue 6 years ago · comments

I have never had any problems running dvtm on older FreeBSD installations. It "just works" and I see 'rxvt' defined as my TERM variable. This is dvtm 0.5.2 on FreeBSD 7.x.

Now, however, on an up to date FreeBSD 11.0 and dvtm 0.15, I cannot run dvtm without this error:

csh: cannot open /etc/termcap
csh: using dumb terminal settings

... and the result is that dvtm works, but instead of the nice extended ASCII lines, my window borders are all made of 'q' and 'x' characters and none of my ncurses commands will run, can't run vi, etc. ("vi: No terminal database found")

My best attempt at solving this was to convert dvtm.info into termcap format:

infotocap dvtm.info >> /etc/termcap

... and then rebuild the termcap database:

cap_mkdb /etc/termcap

... which completes without errors, but does not solve the problem or change the behavior at all. Since FreeBSD uses termcap, converting terminfo to termcap loses some things because of the 1023 byte limit.

Alternatively:

I have set BOTH my TERM and DVTM_TERM environment variables to xterm-256color and executed dvtm with the following command line:

TERM='xterm-256color' DVTM_TERM='xterm-256color' dvtm

.... but nothing changed. Still "cannot open /etc/termcap".

How may I run dvtm on FreeBSD ?

Deleted user · Answer 1 · Fri May 18 2018 00:00:08 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I remember running it on FreeBSD once, so it is possible. As soon as I have a FreeBSD vm setup I'll try and tell how it goes...

rsyncnet · Answer 2 · Fri May 18 2018 02:09:38 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thank you - appreciated. I also had dvtm working "properly" on older versions of FreeBSD (7 and 8, I think) but 10 and 11 break in the way I described.

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On Thu, 17 May 2018, Josuah Demangeon?? wrote: I remember running it on FreeBSD once, so it is possible. As soon as I have a FreeBSD vm setup I'll try and tell how it goes... ? You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.[AFXYHxcMLVPy07DjYR8oq50GGWJeOmkPks5tzZ6KgaJpZM4RO1z3.gif]

rsyncnet · Answer 3 · Thu Aug 09 2018 23:17:14 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@josuah

I wonder if you ever had a chance to test this in a FreeBSD VM ?

Thanks.

Deleted user · Answer 4 · Wed Aug 15 2018 16:30:00 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

To compile it I need to devine SIGWINCH to whatever (we may have to tinker with -D_BSD_SOURCE and alike to get it).

Then I can start dvtm right away: ./dvtm

I now have what I probably had the last time : I have to define TERM to something in order to start curses-based programs. So it does not solve the issue.

Note that no terminfo/cap have been used at all so far.

Deleted user · Answer 5 · Wed Aug 15 2018 17:12:53 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Ah, I figured out : You still need the path to the termcap.db is /usr/share/misc/termcap.db and not /etc/termcap.db. I'll send a patche to improve portability...