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Date:      Thu, 19 Feb 2015 20:41:17 -0800
From:      Kevin Oberman <rkoberman@gmail.com>
To:        Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
Cc:        Davide Italiano <davide@freebsd.org>, FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>, freebsd-current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org>, Xin LI <d@delphij.net>
Subject:   Re: default pager (csh)
Message-ID:  <CAN6yY1uO0WrxpcEtPO9AXUNBsfmhnSrwxKX7KrLgH5aCJNpSRQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAN6yY1udfAudVeM1KJapTLhnHZwiNtHhTxmk9%2BOh0Xuid6t7-Q@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <CACYV=-GBD5FmnsQr=KC6Wc9qZ9UAFPQgPmNyS5Jr6Vs2G7dGjA@mail.gmail.com> <54E5232F.3060409@delphij.net> <54E59BF7.40207@freebsd.org> <alpine.BSF.2.11.1502191806400.40355@wonkity.com> <CAN6yY1udfAudVeM1KJapTLhnHZwiNtHhTxmk9%2BOh0Xuid6t7-Q@mail.gmail.com>

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On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, Julian Elischer wrote:
>>
>>  On 2/18/15 3:41 PM, Xin Li wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> The _only_ reason that I can think of is that more(1) does not clear
>>>> screen for certain terminals (done with 'ti' and 'te' sequences),
>>>> while less(1) when running as less does.
>>>>
>>>> The less(1) behavior can be annoying to some people (sometimes even
>>>> myself when using less to show contents of a file and ^Z to paste
>>>> them), and unfortunately quite a few of them also happen to be the
>>>> more vocal ones when it comes to a change.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I find that behaviour infuriating
>>>
>>> I page down to a place to get some text on the screen to use as  a
>>> reference, then exit to run a command with that information, and *bam* the
>>> info I wanted to use has gone away.
>>>
>>
>> It doesn't do that on csh.  Or maybe I figured out how to prevent it long
>> ago and forgot, but all I use is this:
>>
>> setenv  PAGER   "less -RS"
>>
>
> You probably did what I used to do. Modify the termcaps/terminfo to
> eliminate this behavior. See Exorcising the Evil Alternate Screen
> <http://shallowsky.com/linux/noaltscreen.html>.
>
> In the past, FreeBSD disabled this by default. It was changed several
> years ago, but you can change it back as per the above referenced article.
>
>
Well, I just looked at this and it looks like FreeBSD is using termcap, not
terminfo. So you can "fix" this by defining TERM to a version of xterm that
does not define alternate screen. I use xterm which, rather surprisingly,
does not define ti or te. Neither do any of the xterm variants that I can
find in termcap.  (N.B. I am NOT running xterm. I am using mate-terminal,
but it still works.) rxvt variants do define them, as do a great many
others. Take a look at /usr/share/misc/termcap. Just remember that editing
it does nothing until termcap.db is rebuilt.
--
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman@gmail.com



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