It’s rude to install a terminfo on a remote machine (which you may not be the owner of). It’s a preposterous for a terminal emulator to install things on a remote machine just to make it work.
It's actually the remote machine that isn't working, but I get the frustration. What I did to fix this is to override the environment variables in your SSH config like this:
If you want to use in a terminal emulator features that do not exist in any xterm variant and the remote computer does know only xterm, there is no way to do that without installing data into the terminfo database.
Otherwise, there is no need to install anything, you should just set the environment variable TERM in the remote computer to one of the xterm variants and then modern terminal emulators like kitty or ghostty will still work fine, but of course only as long as you use the xterm-compatible subset of their features.
It's not a VAX that you're physically plugging a terminal into. The remote machine is totally capable of communicating with a newer terminal, it just needs to know how. You're being nice by giving it that information. You can also just install it locally in your home directory (~/.terminfo). (You used to be able to stuff the entire entry into the TERMCAP environment variable and not install anything.)
I presume though that the mentioned fix only installs the terming for the user, rather than system-wide. I don’t see how that’d be rude (assuming it’s some non-root user that you should reasonably be considered to have control over).
Yea unfortunately eg Ubuntu’s bashrc has a script which will make it drop colors regardless of the presence of ghostty’s terminfo. Its `screen` will also fail, so e.g. it will refuse to upgrade to a new distro release.
Every terminfo is custom, to the terminal it applies to. It's just that most entries are 20+ years old and even glacial distros have converged on some version of the database that mostly worked, until the recent resurgence of interest in actually writing new terminal software.
Agree with the weakness, but the benefit of provenance is still there. You can't tell if the picture that person took is of an AI image, but there's some value in saying "I took this" and being able to prove it.
I hope future social media presents this metadata so if someone claims a photo is from the BBC, it actually gets checked against the keys the BBC sign their photos with.
Ideally it’d be linked to public key on a DNS txt record or similar, and trustworthy clients (including social media apps) show the domain linked to the photo.
I was at a company acquired by IBM, and left within two years. When asked by HR at my exit interview why I was leaving I honestly answered "Lotus Notes".
My reasoning (which I ranted on extensively for the rest of the interview) was that mandating Lotus Notes as a tool internally, let alone continuing to sell it, reflected very poorly on how IBM felt about their employees, customers, and products. Examples:
* for YEARS IBM had to ship a "killnotes.exe" utility to their own employees because they couldn't figure out how to gracefully exit the app - and that's just one papercut out of hundreds;
* they misrepresented the popularity of the product, as the number of seats sold was tied to other bundled deals - most customers wouldn't touch the product;
* they continually gaslit employees and customers that Notes was great for common workflows (email in particular, searching in general) where in fact it was overwhelmingly a failure - and anyone who complained "didn't understand the product";
* they would send out multiple-choice surveys on "How would you like to improve Notes?" with every question and possible answer tied to developer-focused and database features with nothing allowing feedback on the primary use-cases that were driving users up the wall
In the end IBM's stance on Notes was either tone-deaf, incompetent, mendacious, malicious, opportunistic, extractive, callous, or shameless with no sense of pride in product.
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