256 color terminal blues

[risa2000]

I have been recently playing with 256 color support in terminal. Though it has been there for some time already I noticed it only now. It is really an irony I have been running several gentoo installs for few years already and always felt a bit limited by native ssh 16 color terminal .

I am mostly using Putty and until now I have been using it with xterm setting for terminal, which I changed to xterm-256color. This works great (I mean in vim, since I am not aware of any other terminal app.).

The problems started when I run screen in xterm-256color terminal - the terminal window size get resized (probably to 80 columns or whatever is the default settings) and lost the colors. This seemed easy to fix (in theory) by setting up .screenrc locally to:

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term screen-256color
width 120 50

This should add colors and preserve the size of terminal window. I was not very happy with that though, it locks screen size independently of what the actual terminal window size was. Fortunately, it did not work. Screen started complain at startup about:

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Your termcap does not specify how to change the terminal's width to 120.

and did not start. Mind that this complain is related to xterm-256color termcap.

Then I found there is terminfo for putty-256color, so I tried that. Surprisingly, this works with screen well (in terms of window size), I did not have to specify the size at all and it preserves actual window size well. So only:

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term screen-256color

was needed in .screenrc.

EDIT: Now I found out, that some things stopped working. E.g. window title of terminal window is no longer updated with progress when running emerge - I guess it is because emerge does not know putty. So I would really like to stay with xterm-256color.

There was only one small detail, I had to change my .bashrc to properly set up window title also for putty type terminals and also add this one into /etc/DIR_COLORS database for dircolors to properly set LS_COLORS.

Now I wonder, what might the be problem with xterm-256color? Why screen cannot change its size, when for putty type (or normal xterm type with basic colors) it works?

EDIT2: After a while, I figured out how to do it in a better way. I have put back xterm-256color into putty terminal specification and in .bashrc defined alias:

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alias screen="TERM=xterm screen"

This makes screen think it is running on xterm and do not screw up window size and xterm-256color in putty makes emerge happy to report to window title bar. And since there is screen-256color in .screenrc, 256 colors are even available in screen itself.