Differences between xterm and pterm mac os x#

Also, you can use the infocmp command to view the current terminfo settings or compare two different ones, e.g., infocmp xterm-color xterm-256color will show you all the differences between those two. If you’re not familiar with the terminfo system, take a look at the x-man-page://5/terminfo man page. So some users would still need to know about using the recommended Xterm values with Terminal for compatibility with those.

A number of programs and shell customization scripts explicitly check whether $TERM starts with (or is equal to) xterm.

Someone apparently has updated nsterm recently (sometime in the past couple of years), but I don’t know whether that has made its way into the ncurses distribution, and it may not be completely up to date with Terminal in 10.7. nsterm represents Terminal’s ancestor from NeXTSTEP.

There isn’t one that’s up to date currently.

Note that technically Terminal should have its own up-to-date terminfo values that describe exactly which features it supports, instead of using the values for Xterm, but: Sometimes people explicitly set TERM to xterm-color (as opposed to the recommended Xterm values) to disable functionality or work around incompatibilities between the available terminfo values on a particular computer and the terminal emulator being used. Set by the XTerm program in the child processes that it spawns for terminal sessions. Prior to 10.7, xterm-color was the default because Terminal didn’t support some critical features described by the recommended Xterm terminfo values, e.g., Background Color Erase (BCE), modern codes for switching main/alternate screens, 256 colors. The TERM environment variable is its primary source of information.

Differences between xterm and pterm mac os x#

In particular, xterm-256color is the default for Terminal starting with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, with the next-best recommended values being xterm-16color or xterm (which only describes support for eight ANSI colors). Usually you’ll want to use xterm, xterm-16color or xterm-256color. xterm-color is not recommended, since it describes a variant of Xterm that’s less functional and that you’re not likely to be using. This is a big issue for me, as my login/logout scripts rely on manipulating titlebars. pterm 0.53-b-1 worked perfectly for reading back titlebars, the current one doesnt. xterm-color describes an older branch of Xterm that supports eight colors. Package: pterm Version: 0.53-b-1 Severity: important In pterms xterm implementation, the support for reading back titlebar values has become less good. Xterm-256color describes Xterm with support for 256 colors enabled.