How do I set up my term cap so I can use Pico? I've started using it ovt
over at m-net and I'm hooked. D put some arcane Unix coomand in
my .cfonce file or what? Inquiring minds want to know...

55 responses total.

you will want to have a 
setenv TERM vt100 in your .login file, and a 
define EDITOR pico in your .cfonce file.

At least have some TERM in your .login, but the .cfonce file contents
are good enough.
 
Can you do it yourself, or want it done?

Is .login the proper file for people whose default shell isn't csh?
(For sh, it's .profile, I think.  But raven shows /b, which I think
is just picospan, & I don't know what it uses as a login shell.)

The /b shell runs sh first, then launches bbs.  So the proper place for
anyone with /b as their shell to make pico their default editor is in
.profile, which should contain the lines:

        EDITOR=pico
        VISUAL=pico
        export EDITOR VISUAL

That ought to make pico the default editor for any program that allows you
to launch an editor, such as Picospan or mail.  (Not sure if it's enough
for "elm", which may require you to set "pico" as both primary and visual
editor in your elm options file also.  You can do this in elm by typing
"o" at the elm command prompt.)

        Well after a big hastle I managed to edit my .profile correctley.
I managed to erase something crucial and get bounced off the system.
Foutunatley tsty was very helpful and restored my .profile. Now I just
can't seem to get .login edited... Help this is an editor nightmare : (
I still get incomplete term cap entry and .login isn't showing up in
my dir...

Unless you're going to use csh, you don't need a .login.  Possibly I
see the problem in your .profile.  Here are sections from yours & from
mine:

From my .profile:
if tty -s
then
# next two only apply to interactive shells
        stty intr '^C' kill '^U' erase '^H'
        eval `/usr/ucb/tset -s -m 'dialup:?ansi-new' -m 'su:?ansi-new'
        "${TERM-ansi-new}"` MESG=mesg ; export MESG mesg y
fi

From your .profile:
...
tset=ansi-new
...
if tty -s
then
# next two only apply to interactive shells
        stty intr '^_' kill '^X' erase '^H'
        MESG=mesg ; export MESG
        mesg y
fi

The line tset=ansi-new is not (I think) going to accomplish anything.  It
just sets an environment variable, tset, & doesn't export it.  Possibly
you want or need    tset ansi-new    (without the =).  The equivalent line
in mine is the eval line, but that's because I want it to ask me for my
TERM variable.

I can't offer to edit your file for you.  But try taking out the =.

How do I edit my file with an incomplete termcap? I can;t post to use net
now, which I'm missing already. Oh woh is me... I'll take ANY editor if
I can get my ability to post to usenet again. Someone help me and I promise
I'll never mention editors again. Please explain in simple language.
Depressed clueless newbie : (.

        Steve repaired my .profile. I'm psyched i can use pico and usenet
now, too cool. My next purse is one of those Unix books for non-techie
types : ).

   Lately when I've tried to use Pico, it hasn't worked right.  It just beeps
when I try to backspace, use the cursor keys, or tell it y or n when I try to
quit and it wants to know whether to save the file.  It does, however, work
fine as the editor in Pine, it is just when I try to use it alone or as the
editor for something else that it gives me trouble.  My term=vt100.  Any idea
what would be wrong with it?

When you say "lately" does that indicate that you have been able to
do all the editing you wanted, anywhere you wanted, and stuff worked
just fine? Or something else?
  
And, if Pico has worked just fine everywhere 'before', can you pinpoint
any changes you have made anywhere?

When I first started using it, several months ago, it worked fine.  I didn't
use it for a couple of months, and then went back and tried to use it and it
didn't work.  I might have made some changes then, but I don't remember what.

I tried it out once, months ago, & it worked fine.  I tried it again a
couple of days ago (after telling someone about it), & most of the
things on its little menu just beeped.

I just tried it again now, and it's not really "most".  Of the 12 options
displayed at the bottom of the screen, the following produce a beep and
the message [ Unknown command ]: ^G, ^Y, ^V, ^K, ^U.  Also, when I go to
exit, the options for saving are given as (y/n) but it insists that the N
be uppercase.

My TERM setting is ansi-new.  I suspect from the timing that the OS upgrade
is involved in some fashion, but the gap was wide enough to include plenty
of other events as well.

I hope my friend hasn't tried it yet.
(vi is fine for *me*, thank you.)

This response has been erased.

 <<maybe I should try Pico too - heck, I like vi too ...>>

Hmm, very strange.  Pico still works fine for me -- I use 'xterm' as
my usual termcap, but also tried 'vt100' and 'ansi-new' and experienced
no problems.  Looked at scg's and davel's login initialization files,
and they look okay too.

After looking at davel's report of what works and what doesn't, I
think it's a parity problem.  The control codes that don't work
all have ascii codes with ODD parity, and the ones that do have
EVEN parity.  It appears that Pico is looking at all 8 bits of
the character when it processes a command instead of ignoring the
parity bit like it should.  

So maybe your comm. program is sending even parity?  If so, try
changing it to "none" and see if that fixes things.

I found out something useful, but I have no idea whatsoever about what to
do about it.  I'm running a 7E because Grex gives me garbage at 8N
(apparently setting the 8th bit on output).  I went into Pico & got the
specified behavior.  I entered a bit, then did ^G for help & got the
unknown command message.  I then switched my settings to 8N and tried
^G again.  I got help.  After exiting help, I used ^X to exit, and when
it asked me whether to save, I said n (lower case) & it apparently
exited - I just got garbage, presumably from more ordinary Grex functions.
(In the course of resetting again I managed to hang up & had to call in
again, so I can't be *sure*.)

I don't know why at 8n Pico is apparently able to avoid setting that 8th
bit but most of Grex is not.  I presume that on input Pico is interpreting
the parity bit as a data bit, whereas most Grex functions just strip it.
That's the extent of my understanding of what's going on.  Possibly I would
need to use Mark or Space parity instead of Even to have it work both ways?
I really don't know what those two settings do.

In any case, presumably the commands that were recognized are the ascii
characters whose parity bits happened to come out 0.  Good thing ^X was
one of them.

John slipped in, with the same conclusion I reached.

Great minds run in the same channels, y'know.

I tried N7, hoping that that would work in both, but that just made Pico
totally functionless.  Is there anything that I could try to make it work
in both Pico and other grex things?  E7 only works in other grex functions,
and 8N only works in Pico.

Also, why would Pine, which uses Pico as the editor, work, while Pico alone
does not?

Does pine actually call pico, or is pico the composer module extracted &
separately compiled (possibly with slightly different options or a slightly
different rev for that matter)?

At least from a quick test, using SPACE parity seems to work.  Again, I'm
not sure what this setting really means, so I make no guarantees.

And Procomm's doc suggests using N81 and using their "translate table"
feature (which allows custom translation for incoming characters) to strip
the high bit off each character in the range 128-255.  (That is, first you
have to enter the table values for each of those.)

That's a lot of values to enter, unless they provide a shortcut.

"Space" parity means that the high bit is always 0, which I guess is
exactly what you want.

Just out of curiosity, I did a 'strings /usr/local/bin/pine'. ('Strings'
is a Unix command that shows you the printable ascii strings in a
binary file.)  Much to my surprise, I got a long, detailed revision
history in which one of the entries was something like "fixed Pico
to be 8-bit clean (was already in Pine)".  This does suggest that
pine runs an internal version of pico that is not the same as the
stand-alone version.

Pine uses the "Pico composer library", which is a module built from
the same sources as Pico but linked into Pine.  It does not call the
/usr/local/bin/pine binary directly.

Thanks, the space parity works perfectly!

So, if it's been fixed to be 8-bit clean, why isn't it 8-bit clean? (ssf)

Beats me.  I wonder if the pine/pico perns have an email address for
bug reports...

It probably *is* 8-bit clean.  It assumes that your end isn't
going to gratuitiously set the 8th bit on certain characters.

Um, right.  It's Grex that's not, so that I normally do 7E1.  Sorry.

This response has been erased.

I have an idea why Pico may have stopped working at 7E1.  I installed
pico as a stand-alone editor a few months ago.  More recently, someone
(Marc, I think) installed pine, which includes pico as part of the
package.  So the pico I installed probably got overwritten by the
"clean" pico at that point.  Should I re-install the "unclean"
pico, as that seems to work better for people?

Hmm.  I don't remember whether or not I took special pains to avoid 
overwriting the installed version of Pico when I installed Pine.  A
quick check of the file dates would probably tell us.

The file dates on pine and pico are identical, which is why I think
the old pico got overwritten.

All right, people, now you've done it <g>. I started out with a relatively
simple(?) question. You see, when I first logged on to Grex, I said that I 
was using a "dumb"
[A[Dterminal. (I still don't know for sure what those other options mean.
?
,

(Third try. Good God!) All right people, Istarted with a simple question.
A friend suggested I try elm, but the board told me I didn't have enough
rows on my screen to start a file. Huh? OK, I figured it was because I 
had indicated initially that I'm using a dumb terminal. Trying to find
this conference. I found references to .login, .cfonce, and .profile files
but I'll be darned if I can find them. How about csh and sh? I know a
little about BBS's, but apparently far from enough.

They hide them. Try ls -a

Before you change a bunch ofstuff, which you will in a bit anyway, just
what kind of terminal (or emulation) are you actually using? Or, can
you use? If you can adjust the emulation,either  vt-100 or ansi  are
probably the easiest to get used to, if you have either.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss