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Terminfo Entries

Author: Sebastian J. Bronner <waschtl@sbronner.com>
Date: 2023-02-12
URL:https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/st

The Problem

Most Linux-based distributions will have their terminfo entries in the ncurses package. These live in /usr/share/terminfo. There you will find several entries for st. Up until ncurses-6.1 as packaged in ArchLinux, these, did not work well with then-current versions of st.

Specifically, I have observed the following issues when using the terminfo entries supplied with those versions of ncurses:

  • Start st.

  • Run tmux in the st window.

  • Run nvim in tmux.

    • tmux will crash immediately with the following message:

      [lost server]
             %

  • Run w3m with any URL in tmux.

    • w3m will not react to any key presses (most notably the arrow keys and q) and must be terminated with killall w3m.
    • The command line returned where w3m was running will show all the missing keypresses.

For reference, I performed these tests using the following software versions: st 0.8.2, tmux 2.9_a, neovim 0.4.2, and w3m 0.5.3.git20190105-1.

The Workaround

The affected versions of all software packages have since been updated and the issue has been resolved. However, when connecting to older remote systems using ssh in st, those remote systems may still be affected. In those cases, it would help to copy over st's terminfo file and generate user-level terminfo entries:

rsync /usr/share/st/st.info <remote>:
ssh <remote> tic -sx st.info

The generated terminfo database will most likely be placed in ~/.terminfo. The command will print the actual location used. Unfortunately, these files need to be kept up to date by hand. Actually they should probably be removed as soon as a new version of ncurses is installed on the remote system.