Re: [tlug] vi weird when I ssh to one machine

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Darren Cook writes:

 > By "terminal" do you mean on the client machine, or on the server?

By terminal I mean the hardware or program that either drives your
monitor, or in a gui environment, the window.

 > On the client it is xfce4-terminal. But this is the same terminal I
 > use with all the other servers, where `vi` does work fine with
 > TERM=xterm-256color.

OK.  Do you want 256 color vi?  If you don't care, I guess we're done.

With the text of the control sequences it might be possible to guess
what the (remote) vi is trying to do that the terminal doesn't
understand.

Are you sure you're using the same vi (vi vs vim vs nvi ...) on all
hosts?  Also, I don't know how complex vi's configuration system is
(eg, with bash or git you might be pulling in a rc file embedded in
the rings of Saturn), but there may be a config file you don't
normally mess with in /etc or somewhere that has something in it that
causes vi to emit rarely used control sequences.  There's a comment in
the terminfo database source that most other emulators don't
understand the "initc" sequence that can be used in xterm to
initialize the 256 color palette, but that seems unlikely to be your
issue since that should only happen once and after that you should
have no trouble getting work done.

The ncurses terminal driver is a horror of special cases.  To get an
idea, visit https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html,
search to "######## X TERMINAL EMULATORS", and scroll for a few pages.
Be assured, however many you can bear to look at, there are quite a
few more. ;-)

The header comment is also quite amusing, for connoisseurs of GNU
infighting. :-)

Steve