On Fri, Oct 16, 2026 at 08:26:23PM +0200, dan wrote: > So for the best unicode support / capabilities what console type do you > suggest, xterm?
These are basically two separate issues. The console has support for a utf-8 mode, but: 1. There are still known bugs in the code. and 2. All of the default console fonts are limited to iso-8859-1 characters anyway. So this mode of operation is not really very useful at the moment unless you are actually developing the code. For terminal capabilities, the default of vt220 is very limited. This is most noticeable due to the lack of colour support in programs that use the terminal type instead of just sending arbitrary control sequences and hoping for the best. Of course, this is because real vt220 terminals do not support colour, so obviously the vt220 terminfo entry does not either. The framebuffer console on OpenBSD supports true colour 32-bit displays, but unless your programs write directly to the terminal instead of using curses, then the only colour you'll see is the blue background for kernel messages. The pccon terminfo entry does not accurately describe the capabilities of the OpenBSD framebuffer console, and there is no attempt being made to make them compatible. Maybe it works for some things, maybe it does not. There are known issues with it that I have mentioned before. The OpenBSD framebuffer console is also not 100% compatible with xterm. But I have made various improvements to improve that compatibility. It works well enough for many users. Feel free to test it, and report any programs that don't work with that setting. Patches to improve compatibility with xterm are generally considered worthwhile. But it would be wrong to claim that it is 100% compatible at the moment. It is not, and for example various, (mostly obscure or seldom used), control sequences are not implemented or produce different visual behavior to actual xterm. Compatibilty could be improved further, but the problem is not really a technical one. A very high degree of compatibility would require implementing a lot of seldom used xterm features, and that would bloat the wscons code. Trying to find a balance between completeness, code size, and code complexity that keeps everybody happy has proven to be difficult. I have a number of patches that work fine locally, but have not been published because the lack of consensus on what is required and acceptable makes it something of a pointless exercise. So, if you want to try setting TERM=xterm and see what happens, I think you will probably be happy. If not, then change it to something else.
