*BSD News Article 35412


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!xlink.net!news.ppp.de!hcshh.hcs.de!hcswork!hm
From: hm@hcswork.hcs.de (Hellmuth Michaelis)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: pcvt and vi conflict?
Date: 25 Aug 94 10:28:39 GMT
Organization: HCS Hanseatischer Computerservice GmbH
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <hm.777810519@hcswork>
References: <32vtnd$3qc@jpunix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hcswork.hcs.de
X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #3

In <32vtnd$3qc@jpunix.com> perry@jpunix.com (John A. Perry) writes:

>	I just installed pcvt under FreeBSD 1.1 on a 486/33. I think it's 
>a great add-on except for one problem. Vi now seems to be acting funny. 
>When I call up a file under vi, only the top part of the screen shows any 
>text. When I move down the page, the bottom part of the screen starts to 
>fill in. Page up and page down also exhibit this behavior. Is there some 
>sort of inconsistency or incompatibility between vi (elvis) supplied with 
>FreeBSD and pcvt? Can it be fixed somehow?

The cause of this behaviour was that vi was run with a stty-baudrate setting
of 1200 baud.

When vi is thinking it is running on a terminal with 1200 Baud and lower, it
changes its way of updating the terminal screen. This behaviour exposed a
bug in the termcap entries which are supplied with pcvt: the SF and SR are
simply wrong and should be removed or replaced with correct entries.

After removing or replacing these entries it was reported that vi still does
not behave as it should.

The only way to make vi happy was to set the baudrate to a higher value, i.e.
9600 or 19200 baud (my baudrate entries all show 115200 Baud).

I tried hard to reproduce this all, but as an emacs user, the screen output
and behaviour of vi on pcvt and an original VT220 with several different
standard and non-standard termcap entries looked alltogether totally strange
to me - if there is someone with a deeper vi insight and experience out there,
i'd like to hear from him/her !

For now the solution is to set the baudrate on pcvt screens to 9600 Baud or
higher, check your entries in /etc/ttys and/or /etc/gettytab, the "default"
entry in /etc/gettytab places a given port into 1200 Baud ....

hellmuth
--
Hellmuth Michaelis    HCS Hanseatischer Computerservice GmbH    Hamburg, Europe
 Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined (Murphy)