Nosh Alternatives

nosh reviews and mentions

• No_color
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 May 2023

  True. But this is a problem that should be addressed with equal if not far more fervour to pushing some other environment variable.

  Because although the meanings aren't specified the TERM environment variable itself is named in the Single Unix Specification, unlike some other environment variables (even COLORTERM).

  And the TERM=dumb convention is documented widely and long, at least as far back as 1983, in books and in on-line doco.

  * It's in the McGraw-Hill book _Introducing the UNIX System_published in 1983. Amusingly, this uses the C shell setenv syntax to demonstrate setting it, indicating how the C shell was the Bourne Again shell of its time.

  * It's in the 4BSD manual page for TERM(7) from 1985. It's still in the OpenBSD manual page for term(7) to this day: https://man.openbsd.org/term.7 . The 4BSD TERM(7) manual had a list of well-known types, and "dumb terminals with no special features" was one of them. See https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4.3BSD-UWisc/man/... for example.

  * It is the documented default fallback for AT&T Unix System 5 Release 4's tset(1) command when nothing in the the ttytype(5) file matches. "If the serial port is not found in /etc/ttytype, the terminal type is set to dumb." said the USL manual.

  (No, it's not the ncurses tset(1)'s fallback. Bear in mind that the "n" in "ncurses" meant "new". ncurses was a reimplementation. Like many reimplementations, it missed bits of actual System 5 Release 4.)

  * Setting TERM to the right thing instead of a dumb terminal type in order to enable colour is in Coffin's _UNIX System V Release 4 Complete Reference_ published in 1991.

  This is how long and wide a pedigree TERM=dumb has.

  Even I, who is progressive enough that I have joined the bright new future of 1976, with my softwares defaulting to TERM=ansi if it isn't set, document the convention that TERM=dumb meant using no escape or control sequences and just (a few) C0 control codes such as LF and CR. See https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml and https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/79b1c0aab9834a09a59e15d47... . And yes, I implement that convention. "dumb" gets several mentions at https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TerminalCapab... .