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README.terminfo.rst

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Terminfo Entries

Author: Sebastian J. Bronner <[email protected]>
Date: 2019-10-30
URL:https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/st

The Problem

Most Linux-based distributions will have the bulk of their terminfo entries in the ncurses package. These live in /usr/share/terminfo. There you will find several entries for st. These, however, do not work well with current versions of st. You need the terminfo entries supplied with st.

Specifically, I have observed the following issues when using the terminfo entries supplied with ncurses:

  • Start st.

  • Run tmux in the st window.

  • Run nvim in tmux.

    • tmux will crash immediately with the following message:

      [lost server]
             %

  • Run w3m with any URL in tmux.

    • w3m will not react to any key presses (most notably the arrow keys and q) and must be terminated with killall w3m.
    • The command line returned where w3m was running will show all the missing keypresses.

For reference, I performed these tests using the following software versions: st 0.8.2, tmux 2.9_a, neovim 0.4.2, and w3m 0.5.3.git20190105-1.

The Solution

The ncurses package should stop shipping terminfo entries for st. These should then be provided in /usr/share/terminfo by this (and other) st packages. The conflicting terminfo entries are

  • st and
  • st-256color.

Additional entries that could be considered for removal from ncurses are

  • st-0.6,
  • st-0.7,
  • st-16color,
  • st-direct,
  • stterm (for distributions that rename st to stterm),
  • stterm-16color, and
  • stterm-256color.

This solution cannot be implemented without the cooperation of ncurses since many distributions (including Arch Linux) do not allow for two packages that provide files with identical paths to be installed side-by-side. Therefore, I am bringing this to the attention of the ncurses team.

The Workaround

A somewhat painful, albeit pragmatic, workaround is as follows: A user that encounters issues that are due to mismatched terminfo entries, such as those above, can symlink the terminfo entries included in this package into her user-level terminfo database using the following commands:

mkdir ~/.terminfo/s
ln -s /usr/share/st/terminfo/s/* ~/.terminfo/s