"screen" causes problems for non-screen tty's

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 05:11:41PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   I'll avoid a long story, but I've got a bunch of stuff I want to do in
> different text console tty's.  I log on as a regular user for email,
> news, websurfing, etc.  I log on as a second special-purpose user for
> other stuff like programming, etc.  When I open up a separate tty for
> each of my tasks, 6 tty's is not enough.  I had to edit /etc/inittab
> like so to get enough consoles...
> 
> # TERMINALS
> c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux
> c2:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux
> c3:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux
> c4:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux
> c5:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux
> c6:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux
> c7:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty7 linux
> c8:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty8 linux
> c9:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty9 linux
> c10:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty10 linux
> 
>   The X-session is in tty11, and I can run a second one in tty12 if I
> get ambitious.
> 
>   Why am I not using screen, you ask?  Well, I tried, and everything
> worked OK *UNDER SCREEN*, e.g. vim and mc (Midnight Commander).  But...
> I started having problems in tty's that were *NOT* running under screen.
> Vim and mc started spewing out A's and B's rather than moving the cursor
> when I pressed the up and down arrows.  Apparently screen kicks *ALL*
> text consoles into vt100 mode *PERMANENTLY*, even different tty's
> running different users.  I have not been able to turn this off, other
> than by re-booting (bleagh).
> 
>   I tried "export TERM=vt100", and it "worked".  The keys did what
> they were "supposed to do".  The 4 grey arrow keys moved the cursor
> around properly, and all the keys on the numeric keypad generate weird
> escape sequences as per the vt100 spec... oops.  Losing the numeric
> keypad is *NOT* acceptable, so I gave up.  Anybody have any ideas on how
> to get screen to play nice?

What distribution and version are you running?  I have never personally
seen behaviour matching what you are seeing.  I run screen in some VTs
and not in others, dettach, come back later and reattach in another VT,
sometimes in an xterm, etc and never a problem.  Only problem I have
ever had is if I login as one user, su to another, run screen, then
screen doesn't work right.

I suspect a terminfo/curses configuration problem.

Lennart Sorensen
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