On Fri, Nov 15, 2024 at 2:09 AM Philip Guenther <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 3:56 PM Anders Andersson <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm trying to move my screen+irssi (irc client) setup from a linux > > machine to OpenBSD 7.6 but I found that screen has a slightly > > different behaviour that I can't debug further. I know I should switch > > to tmux one of these days, but old habits die hard. I want to see if I > > can fix this first. > > > > The problem is that I don't get any colours in irssi when I start > > screen in detached mode. Detached mode means something like this: > > > > $ screen -d -m irssi > > > > This starts irssi in a new screen session in the background, without > > attaching to it directly. As the manual points out, this is useful in > > startup scripts, and I normally run this from cron with @reboot. > > > > However, screen -d -m causes irssi to draw everything monochrome, > > while plain screen works: > > > > $ screen irssi <- colours > > > > $ screen -d -m irssi > > $ screen -r <- no colours > > > > On my linux machines I get colours in both modes and I can't seem to > > find what the difference is. > > > > $TERM is "screen" on both instances, and I've tried manually changing > > it to things like "xterm", "screen-256color" with no effect. > > I think you're on the correct line, but maybe there's some other > environment variable affecting things. > > So, run 'env' in both and compare the output for other differences.
Thanks! This showed me that even though TERM is identical in both places, TERMCAP is not! When I unset TERMCAP inside the "broken" screen, irssi starts working as expected again. When I knew what to search for, I found a nearly identical question on Stack Exchange: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/67450/gnu-screen-strange-termcap-when-using-d-m with a very detailed answer for FreeBSD but I assume the root cause is the same on OpenBSD. The solution I found the least intrusive was to just start irssi like this: env -u TERMCAP irssi // Anders
