Re: GNU screen VIM / terminal garbling on OS X and Cygwin?

[Fredrik Tolf]

On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 17:03 -0700, Seth House wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I've tried to find this information by searching the list archives and
> Google, and have spent some time trying to figure this out for myself
> to no avail. Part of my problem may be that I'm not entirely sure what
> to search for. I would greatly appreciate any advice you all could
> offer since this has crippled my ability to use screen on my non-Linux
> boxen, and ^a has become second nature to me!
> 
> When using screen it will frequently garble the terminal display and
> redrawing the display has no effect. This has been most reproducible
> when running Vim and scrolling through the buffer.
> [...]

I'm really just guessing now, but looking at that SWF, these are my
conclusions:
1. The problem doesn't seem to be in screen itself, since it scrolls
around the faulty line perfectly well.
2. Looking at the effect, it would almost seem as if vim erroneously
uses the wrap-at-end-of-line behavior of certain terminals (that is, the
effect where some terminals don't wrap to the next line when you're just
one position outside the current line).

Maybe it could be that the OSX implementation of curses (dunno if OSX
uses GNU ncurses) misinterprets screen's terminfo file? Maybe you could
try compiling your own copy of GNU ncurses and LD_PRELOAD it into vim at
start time to see if that solves the problem.

Then again, I'm really just guessing, so you shouldn't take my words too
seriously. If this happened to me, I would locate a solid and simple
test case and strace vim (or, alternatively, screen) at the point it
messes up, and try to see from that what it does wrong.

HTH,
Fredrik Tolf