From owner-freebsd-stable Sat May 4 23:39:13 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from pakastelohi.cypherpunks.to (pakastelohi.cypherpunks.to [213.130.163.34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5C1E937B405 for ; Sat, 4 May 2002 23:39:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from LUCKYVAIO (adsl-208-201-244-240.sonic.net [208.201.244.240]) (using TLSv1 with cipher RC4-MD5 (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by pakastelohi.cypherpunks.to (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0C3CB3647E for ; Sun, 5 May 2002 08:39:07 +0200 (CEST) From: "Lucky Green" To: Subject: Re: xterm and colour (Was: cvs commit: ports/mail/mutt-devel...) Date: Sat, 4 May 2002 23:38:59 -0700 Organization: Cypherpunks Jihad Message-ID: <002301c1f3ff$8c52a100$c33a080a@LUCKYVAIO> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.3416 Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [Quotes from various folks about FreeBSD's "xterm" not supporting color elided]. I don't know what the historical reasons are why FreeBSD's xterm does not support color. Perhaps it was because there at one point was a physical xterm device (like a genuine VT100 terminal) that would puke if it were trying to connect to a server that extends xterm to include color support. Who knows. I am sure there were good reasons for only supporting monochrome for xterm, with the color version being called xterm-color. But I do know this: >90% of the users of various applications that identify their terminal type as "xterm" expect that terminal server on the other end to serve characters in color. Unless there is a really good reason for not supporting color in xterm today, as compared to perhaps a few years ago, I would urge whomever is in charge of termcap to please change the termcap entry for xterm to support color to bring it in line with user expectations. Even if that breaks things for those using a True Xterm (TM), as long as there is a fix for this small minority of users, the change should be made. --Lucky, who found this unexpected behavior of FreeBSD to be much to the amusement of his penguin-loving friends. I have been working on converting them with quite some success, but xterm's current defaults aren't exactly helping... Just my $0.02. I know that I don't understand all the issues that factored into the decision to not support color in xterm. While we are on this topic: the CONS25 default absolutely has to go. Make it VT*, make it anything that is widely supported other than that obsolete, and by today's standards downright obscure, SCO console. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message