Skip to main content

As the title says, I don’t see colors in the ssh screen. I use Cygwin’s ssh to connect to USS. I’m clueless about TERM/TERMINFO/TERMCAP/etc. I read the thread here, but it rambles a bit and I can’t extract a solution from it. Are there any smart people out there who can help?

Edit: I am in fact not seeing colors in Git, either. I have color.ui=auto and color.branch.current=red, but git branch -v gives me:

As the title says, I don’t see colors in the ssh screen. I use Cygwin’s ssh to connect to USS. I’m clueless about TERM/TERMINFO/TERMCAP/etc. I read the thread here, but it rambles a bit and I can’t extract a solution from it. Are there any smart people out there who can help?

Edit: I am in fact not seeing colors in Git, either. I have color.ui=auto and color.branch.current=red, but git branch -v gives me:

Hi Tony,
Can you provide the output of the command “infocmp” on your Linux machine?


As the title says, I don’t see colors in the ssh screen. I use Cygwin’s ssh to connect to USS. I’m clueless about TERM/TERMINFO/TERMCAP/etc. I read the thread here, but it rambles a bit and I can’t extract a solution from it. Are there any smart people out there who can help?

Edit: I am in fact not seeing colors in Git, either. I have color.ui=auto and color.branch.current=red, but git branch -v gives me:

Hi, Tatyana. I don’t use Linux to connect at work; I use SSH over Cygwin. Here’s the output from the infocmp command there:

09:09 /proj/rdl/git/work (s) > infocmp
Error: Term "xterm-256color" not found in /usr/share/lib/terminfo
,
        bitwin#0, bitype#0, btns#0, bufsz#0, colors#0,
        cols#0, cps#0, it#0, lh#0, lines#0, lm#0, lw#0, ma#0,
        maddr#0, mcs#0, mjump#0, mls#0, ncv#0, nlab#0,
        npins#0, orc#0, orhi#0, orl#0, orvi#0, pairs#0, pb#0,
        spinh#0, spinv#0, vt#0, widcs#0, wnum#0, wsl#0,
        xmc#0,

Which looks promising. I don’t know what it means, but it looks promising.


Hi, Tatyana. I don’t use Linux to connect at work; I use SSH over Cygwin. Here’s the output from the infocmp command there:

09:09 /proj/rdl/git/work (s) > infocmp
Error: Term "xterm-256color" not found in /usr/share/lib/terminfo
,
        bitwin#0, bitype#0, btns#0, bufsz#0, colors#0,
        cols#0, cps#0, it#0, lh#0, lines#0, lm#0, lw#0, ma#0,
        maddr#0, mcs#0, mjump#0, mls#0, ncv#0, nlab#0,
        npins#0, orc#0, orhi#0, orl#0, orvi#0, pairs#0, pb#0,
        spinh#0, spinv#0, vt#0, widcs#0, wnum#0, wsl#0,
        xmc#0,

Which looks promising. I don’t know what it means, but it looks promising.

You can download ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.gz file and install this database our local machine
using the following commands in Cygwin:

wget --ftp-user=anonymous ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.gz
gzip -d terminfo.src.gz
export TERMINFO= < your directory >
export TERM=xterm-256color
tic terminfo.src
infocmp > xterm-256color.tic

download xterm256-color.tic file on z/OS
using the following commands on z/OS

export TERMINFO= < your directory >
export TERM=xterm-256color
tic xterm-256color.tic


As the title says, I don’t see colors in the ssh screen. I use Cygwin’s ssh to connect to USS. I’m clueless about TERM/TERMINFO/TERMCAP/etc. I read the thread here, but it rambles a bit and I can’t extract a solution from it. Are there any smart people out there who can help?

Edit: I am in fact not seeing colors in Git, either. I have color.ui=auto and color.branch.current=red, but git branch -v gives me:

Thanks, Yaroslav. Would the tic command affect only my environment? I don’t want to install a database on our local machine if it would overwrite an existing database.


As the title says, I don’t see colors in the ssh screen. I use Cygwin’s ssh to connect to USS. I’m clueless about TERM/TERMINFO/TERMCAP/etc. I read the thread here, but it rambles a bit and I can’t extract a solution from it. Are there any smart people out there who can help?

Edit: I am in fact not seeing colors in Git, either. I have color.ui=auto and color.branch.current=red, but git branch -v gives me:

Hi, Yaroslav. I’m a bit confused - you said “install this database”, then “you can not install a new database”. Do you mean that it’s safe for me to do the gzip and tic commands?


Hi, Yaroslav. I’m a bit confused - you said “install this database”, then “you can not install a new database”. Do you mean that it’s safe for me to do the gzip and tic commands?

I’m a relative newbie to terminfo/ncurses/etc, but the man page indicates that tic will read the terminfo.src file and produce a new terminfo database in the directory pointed to by the TERMINFO environment variable.

This worked for me:

export TERMINFO=$HOME/terminfo  # This will be your personal terminfo database
mkdir $TERMINFO
curl ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.gz | gzip -d >terminfo.src
tic terminfo.src

I’m a relative newbie to terminfo/ncurses/etc, but the man page indicates that tic will read the terminfo.src file and produce a new terminfo database in the directory pointed to by the TERMINFO environment variable.

This worked for me:

export TERMINFO=$HOME/terminfo  # This will be your personal terminfo database
mkdir $TERMINFO
curl ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.gz | gzip -d >terminfo.src
tic terminfo.src

Thanks, Jerry, but the universe has decreed that I’m not to have colors today:

16:45 /u/tstjv > gzip -d terminfo.src.gz
gzip: terminfo.src.gz: not in gzip format

This happens when I pipe the curl output into gzip as well.

Edit: Maybe I’m just cranky, but it feels as if this stuff should be available to everyone without having to go to an external website. In fact …

16:53 /u/tstjv > ls /usr/lib/share/terminfo
ls: FSUM6785 File or directory "/usr/lib/share/terminfo" is not found

… despite the fact that the z/OS UNIX System Services Planning manual says that “[t]he database is in the directory /usr/share/lib/terminfo …”


As the title says, I don’t see colors in the ssh screen. I use Cygwin’s ssh to connect to USS. I’m clueless about TERM/TERMINFO/TERMCAP/etc. I read the thread here, but it rambles a bit and I can’t extract a solution from it. Are there any smart people out there who can help?

Edit: I am in fact not seeing colors in Git, either. I have color.ui=auto and color.branch.current=red, but git branch -v gives me:

Okay! Part of Yaroslav’s edited suggestion worked for me. So as not to be a DenverCoder9, I’ll recap the solution:

Cygwin:

wget --ftp-user=anonymous ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.gz
gzip -d terminfo.src.gz
ftp <zos-machine>
binary
cd <home-directory>
put terminfo.src

z/OS:

cd ~
chtag -tc ISO8859-1 terminfo.src
mkdir ~/.terminfo
export TERMINFO="${HOME}/.terminfo"
export TERM=xterm-256color
tic terminfo.src

Twelve commands, including two file transfers. It’s just that easy!

Oh, and the export commands have to go into your .profile, too.

Edit: This is pretty much what Jerry said, too; just expanded a little. Thanks, Jerry.


As the title says, I don’t see colors in the ssh screen. I use Cygwin’s ssh to connect to USS. I’m clueless about TERM/TERMINFO/TERMCAP/etc. I read the thread here, but it rambles a bit and I can’t extract a solution from it. Are there any smart people out there who can help?

Edit: I am in fact not seeing colors in Git, either. I have color.ui=auto and color.branch.current=red, but git branch -v gives me:

One more thing - following is part of a screenshot of vim on USS (Cygwin connection via SSH), editing the vim colors file. Because I like self-reference.