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GNU Screen with no Wuff! on Mac OS X

11 Aug, 2008

I've switched back from Ubuntu to Mac OS X again. The lack of hardware support was just too frustrating (eg: touchpad without right click, having to reboot to use the CD-ROM, dual screen not working properly, keyboard maps incorrect, no microphone etc) so I instead decided to try to fix some of the problems which made me unhappy with Mac OS X in the first place. The main one is the inability to use GNU Screen with the Terminal because it gives Wuff! messages.

This is actually easy to fix as described here:

http://www.dansanderson.com/blog/2004/07/newbie-linuxmac.html

Full background information is described here:

http://www.ibb.net/~anne/keyboard.html

The tip is duplicated below:

Terminal uses "xterm-color" as its TERM, which, in my Debian Etch installation, had undesired (but common) values for kbs (backspace) and kdch1 (delete). I was able to fix it with:

Log in to the affected Linux box.
echo $TERM to confirm the terminfo setting. (Mac OS X Terminal should be using xterm-color.)
infocmp >xterm-color
Edit xterm-color, find kbs and make sure it reads kbs=\177, and find kdch1 and make sure it reads kdch1=\E[3~. Save.
mkdir -p ~/.terminfo/x
Temporarily set the TERMINFO environment variable to ~/.terminfo. In bash/zsh: export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo
Test-compile the new terminfo file: tic xterm-color If successful, ~/.terminfo/x/xterm-color will be the compiled terminfo file.
unset TERMINFO
If desired, back up the original compiled terminfo file. Look for it as /etc/terminfo/x/xterm-color or /usr/lib/terminfo/x/xterm-color.
Run tic xterm-color again as root (using su or sudo) to compile and install the new version in the official location.

I've tested this and it seems to work well.