[vox-tech] Cygwin's Identity Crisis

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Tue 08 Mar 05,  8:56 AM, Richard S. Crawford <rscrawford at mossroot.com> said:
> I love using Cygwin; it's a great tool, since I find that manipulating
> files is much easier for me from the CLI than with a GUI.
> 
> This morning I SSH'ed into a remote box, though, and executed Vi; instead
> of pulling up the editor, though, I got this message:
> 
> I don't know what kind of terminal you are on - all I have is 'cygwin'.
> [Using open mode]
> 
> I can run Vi through PuTTY on the same remote computer, but it feels
> inelegant to have two separate tools that can do the same thing.  Is there
> a way to make Cygwin deliver a different terminal type, or to get the
> remote machine to understand Cygwin?
 
I don't use Cygwin (I barely know what it is, really).  But if nobody
answers this question, a quick fix that may work until you get a better
solution might be to use:

   export TERM=linux 

Vi will certainly understand that.  What may be questionable is how well
terminfo will be able to do its job.  My prediction is that, if it works,
it'll work nearly perfectly.

If you use UTF, you may want to try this instead:

   export TERM=linux+utf8

assuming bash or a bash-like shell.  I think tcsh/csh syntax would be:

   setenv TERM linux

but I haven't used that shell since the early 90's, so my memory might be a
bit rusty.

Pete

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