CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ncursesrxvt
villasv
villasv

Reputation: 6841

Ncurses from sources and Urxvt don't get along

After installing ncurses from sources, my urxvt is not functioning well. Opening applications likencmpcpp or mutt will give me 

Error opening terminal: rxvt-unicode-256color.

Also opening zsh on urxvt will give me weird keypress behavior, like backspace inserting a space and moving right (even though it actually erased that character in the buffer).

xterm is working perfectly, so the my conclusion is that ncurses is not working on urxvt. But it did work before installing from sources.

Inspecting the default configuration for ncurses build, it already marks rxvt as a fallback, so I don't know what else to do. I've also tried to run the minimal demo from the libcurses++ source and it also failed to open.

How can I make sure that urxvt and ncurses will be friends?

UPDATE: I got everything working again by forcing a reinstall from the package repositories.

sudo apt-get install ncurses-base ncurses-bin ncurses-doc ncurses-examples ncurses-hexedit ncurses-term --reinstall

which pretty much confirms it was a problem with the compiled installation. I still want to know what is missing in the build and install process that will make it work with urxvt.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 439

Answers (1)

Thomas Dickey
Thomas Dickey

Reputation: 54563

urxvt provides its own terminal description, which you can compile with tic. Since you're compiling urxvt from source, that's in its doc/etc directory.

For instance, assuming you have rxvt-unicode.terminfo , then

sudo tic -x rxvt-unicode.terminfo

will fix your problem. Debian adds this in their patches for ncurses, but it is not part of the upstream source.

Further reading:

Upvotes: 1

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