[Info-vax] openvms and xterm

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/17/2024 4:56 PM, Matthew R. Wilson wrote:
> 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.

I believe that VT200/VT300/VT400 and 8bit gives the "best"
VMS experience.

Arne