VI editor in Gnome Terminal leaves text remnants on scroll

Khoa Ton khoa at puresynergy.com
Wed Apr 5 02:37:08 UTC 2006


Donald Arseneau wrote:
> Khoa Ton <khoa at puresynergy.com> writes:
>>I agree that this sounds like it might be a Gnome Terminal bug.
> 
> It is long-standing that gnome terminal is not xterm, yet people
> and distros keep setting the TERM variable to xterm.  Any apps 
> (any that use ncurses) that make use of xterms irregularities in 
> screen control will corrupt the screen.

Good point, Donald.

Taking your suggestion, I tried the following:
	# TERM=gnome /bin/vi /etc/passwd
and the problem of text remnants on scroll still existed.
However, the following setting:
	# TERM=ansi /bin/vi /etc/passwd
eliminated the text remnants on scroll problem!

So, based on this last piece of information:

1) Gnome Teminal does seem to be exhibiting bug on redraw, since
    even setting TERM=gnome exhibited this issue with vim.
2) The workaround to use /bin/vi (secure version of /usr/bin/vim)
    as root would be something like:
	# alias vi="vi -T ansi"

I've updated to Bugzilla report with this information:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=187192

Thanks,
Khoa





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