[Info-vax] openvms and xterm

[Matthew R. Wilson]

On 2024-04-17, motk <meh at meh.meh> wrote:
> So, a really basic one here.
>
> What's the current best practice to match term types between vms and ssh 
> clients? OpenVms doesn't see to understand a termtype of xterm, and I'm 
> not sure if it recognises termtypes from an (inbound session) openssh 
> config file.

In my .Xresources, I have:

XTerm*VT100.decTerminalID: vt102

Then on OpenVMS, $ SET TERM/INQUIRE correctly identifies the device
type. This does _not_ affect the TERM environment variable that gets set
in Linux (e.g. `echo $TERM` still reports xterm-256color).

As others have mentioned, something like vt240 or vt420 would be ideal.
xterm's implementation of vt420 ends up making SET TERM/INQUIRE hang for
several seconds, which is annoying since I have SET TERM/INQUIRE in my
LOGIN.COM. This used to happen with vt240 as well, I think, but that has
been fixed and I just tested it: vt240 should be safe now.

I don't rememeber why I've left my xterm set to vt102...I have vague
memories that 'upgrading' to vt240 caused a problem with something not
at all related to VMS, and vt102 works fine in VMS, so I haven't changed
it.

Instead of setting X resources for your whole X session, you can also
launch xterm with "-ti vt240" to override what's in your X resources
database for that invocation of xterm.

-Matthew