Re: [BLUG] How do you like to get rid of terminal corruption?

When 'reset' doesn't work, I usually do a terminal-based reset. In
Konsole, this is available in the Edit menu as 'Reset and Clear
Terminal'. In GNOME Terminal this is available in the Terminal
menu as 'Reset and Clear'. In 'xterm' this is available via the
Control-Middle-Click context menu and is listed as 'Do Soft Reset' or
'Do Full Reset'. (I would try the 'soft reset' then move to the 'full
reset'.)

Most of the time if the menu bar is disabled, the full menu is available
via a context menu. Worst case, you use the context menu to enable the
full menu, make the change, then disable the menu again.

I know there are other terminal emulators available. It is a standard
hardware terminal feature that has been available in terminal emulators
since the beginning. Any terminal emulator lacking this feature is
incomplete and should either be fixed or tossed out.

It looks like it is using an "alternate character set". That should
be handled by the reset command. This is a DEC VT100 feature -- very
old-school. My concern is that this feature may (1) be broken in your
terminal emulator, as it is rarely used or (2) extended in some weird
way that 'reset' can only handle when it knows the command to send, and
it isn't being sent as the TERM is set to 'xterm' and you're not using
'xterm'.

Not all terminal emulators properly set the TERM variable. They
sometimes support features they do not advertise. In these cases 'reset'
can not properly clear things up.

This is something of a pet peeve of mine, as it turns out quite a few of
the modern terminal emulators support 256-color mode, however when they
wrongly list the TERM as 'xterm' this capacity is totally unavailable to
applications. Why impliment features no application can ever use?

The only time this would happen under acceptable circumstances would be
if you're SSHing in to a non-Linux machine and it doesn't know your TERM
type. In these cases it is common to set it to something close (such as
'xterm'). Even in these cases, the better solution is to copy the data
from your desktop. (Though I'm usually too lazy to actually do this, so
I understand why other people don't do this, too.)

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 05:39:54AM +0000, Mark Krenz wrote:
>
> That only works sometimes. In this case I tried reset and it didn't
> work.
>
> On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 03:55:46AM GMT, Jeremy L. Gaddis [jlgaddis@ivytech.edu] said the following:
> > "reset"?
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu [mailto:blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu]
> > On Behalf Of Mark Krenz
> > Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 10:48 PM
> > To: blug@cs.indiana.edu
> > Subject: [BLUG] How do you like to get rid of terminal corruption?
> >
> >
> > You know, disk encryption, 16 character multiclass passwords that I
> > rotate every week, firewalls that require my approval for every packet,
> > that was never really enough for me. Something was missing, so I
> > decided to learn a binary character set and use it on nearly everything.
> >
> > http://suso.suso.org/mediafiles/terminalgarbage.jpg
> >
> > Now even the causual over the shoulder gawker won't know what I'm doing
> > or who owns files.
> >
> > Ok, just kidding. I'm curious though, how do you usually like to get
> > rid of terminal corruption? Do you just close the terminal or are you
> > daring and try to reverse it by cat'ing out /dev/urandom or /dev/sda?
> > Sometimes I'll try cat'ing /dev/urandom, but something makes me think
> > that its dangerous to do that. Anyone know?