Re: GUI starts up with terminal

[Mike Miller]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 12:30 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
>
> Qterminal does appear to behave differently depending on what the
> value of TERM is when it starts.  For example, try
>
>   TERM=vt102 ./run-octave
>
> vs.
>
>   TERM=dumb ./run-octave
>
> I have no idea why it would need to do that.  It seems overly complex
> for it to try to emulate multiple terminal types.  It seems to me that
> one relatively common feature rich terminal would be sufficient, and
> that it should simply always behave that way.  But maybe I'm missing
> some reasonable justification for providing multiple terminal
> personalities.

I agree, that doesn't make sense to me. Xterm and gnome-terminal
always override TERM, that seems more correct.

I looked into the Konsole source code from which this forked, there is
an application-level setting that lets the user specify environment
variables, including TERM with a default value of xterm. If no TERM is
in the environment it is defaulted to xterm. So at a minimum we should
set TERM to xterm if not in the environment, as you said. We could add
a terminal type to the GUI settings if needed.

The emulator does seem to handle a superset of terminal types in the
Vt102Emulation class so I suppose it is intended behavior. Konsole
even includes a README.linux.console indicating that some users may
want to run

  TERM=linux konsole

and get Linux console-like behavior.

-- 
mike