SO wrote: > I have problems opening remote programs using ncurses library. > Aptitude for example. Menus and other interface components are just > garbage on my term on windows vista. Is there a solution for that?
The answer will depend on what terminal you're using. But first a summary of the problem: The application wants to draw nice looking boxes or lines. So it checks the value of the TERM environment variable and then asks its local terminfo database what the appropriate characters are for that terminal, and prints them. Simple, so far. The problem is that Cygwin terminals are all codepage-based, not Unicode. (There is a rxvt-unicode package, but does not actually support Unicode yet.) A codepage-based program is restricted to only being able to output characters in that codepage, which is pretty much the whole reason in a nutshell why Unicode was invented and is so superior. But anyway the default Windows codepage for most systems does *not* include the line drawing characters. For example, most western locales use Windows-1252: <http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1252.mspx>. Compare this to codepage 437, which is sometimes called the "OEM" codepage because it corresponds to the one originally used on the original IBM PC: <http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/oem/437.mspx>. Hey look, line drawing characters! If you look in slot C4 for example you'll a horizontal line, and then look in the same slot in CP-1252 and you'll see LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS, which explains why you see Ä where you should see a horizontal line, because the terminfo entry was written with CP437 in mind. So one solution is to switch to that codepage. If and only if you are using the Cygwin terminal, then you can do this by adding "codepage:oem" to your CYGWIN environment variable, and everything should work. Except of course if you need to actually view any text with those Latin accented characters. If you are using something other than the built-in Cygwin terminal, then you need a different solution. If you are using rxvt in non-X11 mode, you can try using the built-in Windows font 'Terminal': rxvt -fn Terminal -tn rxvt-cygwin-native -e /bin/bash -li Another alternative (again, for non-X rxvt) is to use a font that is hacked up to pretend to be CP1252 except it's got the line drawing glyphs subsituted in those slots. Google the list archives for "luconP.zip" which is a verion of Lucida Console appropriately modified. After installing this font you should invoke rxvt with something like: rxvt -fn "Lucida ConsoleP-14" -tn rxvt-cygwin-native -e /bin/bash -li You can modify the -14 to select the desired font size. And again this assumes you are using non-X rxvt -- if you're using it in X11 mode you could do something similar (find and specify a font with line drawing characters) except you would want the terminal name set to rxvt-cygwin without "-native". Another solution would be to use a unicode terminal, with the appropriate setting of TERM. This means using a non-Cygwin application which unfortunately usually means pain because they don't play well with Cygwin's pty emulation, but I'm fairly sure there are some out there that work (poderosa?) or have been specially modified to work (cygputty). Another solution is to instead of changing terminals, just select a different value of TERM, i.e. *tell* the remote end you're using a different terminal. The goal here is to select something that is close enough to your terminal that it shares a common set of control codes, but doesn't try to use the line drawing chars. This can be hit and miss, as you're really lying by saying you're using a different terminal than the one you really are, but it can be a quick solution. For example you might try: $ TERM=linux-lat aptitude (This linux-lat terminfo entry is described as "linux with latin1 or latin2 alternate character set" and it conveniently has all the line drawing stuff disabled so you'll just see blanks instead.) And one more possible workaround: take the terminfo entry for your terminal and modify it to use boring Latin ASCII characters (e.g. + | - etc) for line drawing. This is better than the last alternative as you can rest assured that all the other capabilities should work correctly as you're just copying the existing one and modifying it. Here is an example that does this with the rxvt-cygwin-native terminfo entry: $ infocmp -1 rxvt-cygwin-native | \ perl -pe 's@(rxvt-cygwin-native)@$1-latin@;' \ -e '[EMAIL PROTECTED]@acsc=!g#w*q+x\\,<-s.v<m>{\\\\`_0a\\:f\\\\h#}f~p|,@;' \ >/tmp/term.tmp && \ tic -o ~/.terminfo /tmp/term.tmp && \ rm /tmp/term.tmp This creates a new terminal called rxvt-cygwin-native-latin, compiles it, and installs it under your home directory in $HOME/.terminfo. This is useful because terminfo applications look there first before the system location /usr/share/terminfo. You can now use this by changing your rxvt startup shortcut to specify "-tn rxvt-cygwin-native-latin" or as above just for one command as: $ TERM=rxvt-cygwin-native-latin aptitude Note, the terminfo database has to be local to the machine that runs the command, not the machine that runs the terminal. Since you are running aptitude on a remote system you'll need to transfer your new terminfo entry there for this to work, but that's pretty simple: $ (cd ~ && tar c .terminfo) | ssh hostname tar xv Brian -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
