Terminals crap on greater than 80 columns

Posted Jun 5, 2004 1:02 UTC (Sat) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: Terminals crap on greater than 80 columns by smoogen
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

You're right, you've got something wrong. Almost certainly your terminal type (in the TERM environment variable) is set incorrectly. Things like the end of line handling, etc. are not controlled by the terminal emulator: it's emulating the terminal!! The program you run inside the emulator is responsible for handling what happens when the cursor gets to the end of the line. If you "echo $TERM" what does it say? Probably "dumb" or something like that.

A safe bet with all the terminal emulators is to use a terminal type of vt100. That's powerful enough to handle most editing commands. Also you can try either xterm or vt220 if you like. Just set them in your environment before you start your xterm/whatever. You don't say what kind of desktop you have but you can put it in your .xinitrc, or .gnomerc, or whatever else as well. Don't forget to export it:

TERM=vt100
export TERM