Hello Theo,

Theo de Raadt wrote on Sat, Jun 28, 2025 at 11:45:04AM -0600:
> Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> wrote:

>> I'm not sure how "people" might end up
>> with TERM=xterm at the console "by default".

> Obviously they force it manually, because eventually they will ssh to
> other machines.  On other machines, the xterm termcap entries are simple
> and complete and similar, whereas other terminal types (including vt220)
> are highly varied and incomplete.

[... Other users]
> currently use TERM=vt220, except our code is not doing a pure vt220.
> We don't want a pure vt220, either.

I see.  Maybe the world is slowly, very slowly, moving towards a state
where termcap/terminfo becomes obsolete (wouldn't be surpring; actual
hardware terminals obviously aren't common any more).  If that happens,
some standard might eventually emerge, and likely TERM=xterm is the
closest we have so far to such a standard...

To clarify, i'm not objecting to moving wscons to a reduced version
of TERM=xterm capabilities and removing vt220 bits, nor am i
volunteering for doing such work.

Yours,
  Ingo