another TERM gotcha

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 01:31:16PM +0300, Kaj J.Niemi wrote:
> Tim,
> 
> > Seems to me that TERM gnome is a mistake.
> 
> You might want to read through bug #122815 then and communicate something
> internally. Although it started with End and Pos1 keys not working in less
> it ended up as a discussion of TERM=xterm vs. TERM=gnome (the latter won).

That is quite idiotic - IMO but putting it mildly. Instead of
creating a shell function in a startup file, and a bit more
elaborate hack for csh users, or making /usr/bin/less into a shell
wrapper which would do

   case "$TERM" in ; xterm*) TERM=gnome ;; ; esac
   less.real $@

so a few extra keys can be used, this "solution" creates a
widespread trouble.  Sure, FC3 installations can be eventually
"fixed" but there are many more around where this will be biting.
You already seen complaints from a guy that his IRIX login got
funky.  Clearly every such situation can be repaired without
much effort but if a goal was to make everybody into a Unix expert
this is the first time I heard about it.

OK, here is a radical workaround.  Compile yourself 'rxvt', which is
easey, and use that for a graphic terminal.  It will set TERM=rxvt
and that one seems to be widely known. :-)  (Should I add more
"smiles" here?)

  Michal