Re: New terminfo: xterm-ghostty

[Aptivi CEO]

For Vim, upon further investigation and git blaming, ghostty originally used the "ghostty" terminfo name, before those commits changed it to "xterm-ghostty" to try to "fix" key protocols:

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https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/commit/c540d1809515b0fe4e9322e4cfc67197ad13b803

config: default TERM to xterm-ghostty

Default the TERM value to "xterm-ghostty" to prevent breaking vim.

Consider changing back to ghostty in the future

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/commit/d0c673cdfc7ff23b621bf56922f5c50d4991f2b0

terminfo: use 'xterm-ghostty' as primary name

Use "xterm-ghostty" as the primary terminfo name. This is a hack on a

hack...we use "xterm-ghostty" to prevent vim from breaking, and when we

do this as the default we break tcell-based applications (lazygit, aerc,

etc). tcell has a bug where the primary terminfo name must be the

value of TERM. gdamore/tcell#639 fixes the issue

but is not merged yet.

Fixes: 779186a ("config: add term config option")

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Both commits were made on September 28th, 2023. The mentioned tcell pull request https://github.com/gdamore/tcell/pull/639, made by one of ghostty's developers, was merged on December 4th, 2023. Also, the Vim comment mentioned pull request https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/13211 that was closed by commit https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/3695d0e41ba26db074dd5680564a6f87d522fb61 on September 29th, 2023.

As for vttest, I will also take a look at testing ghostty, but electricity problems and other factors prevent me from doing so.

On Fri, Dec 27, 2024, 10:25 PM Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com> wrote:

On Fri, Dec 27, 2024 at 01:00:34PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2024-12-27T15:57:40+0300, Aptivi CEO wrote:
> > A new terminal emulator has just surfaced: ghostty. You can find its
> > website here: https://ghostty.org. I've managed to obtain the compiled
> > xterm-ghostty terminfo file here.
>
> Given that this project is independent of xterm, why would the database
> entry be named "xterm-ghostty" and not simply "ghostty"?

The developers did that to fool vim into believing it's a variant of xterm:

        /// This will be used to set the `TERM` environment variable.
        /// HACK: We set this with an `xterm` prefix because vim uses that to enable key
        /// protocols (specifically this will enable `modifyOtherKeys`), among other
        /// features. An option exists in vim to modify this: `:set
        /// keyprotocol=ghostty:kitty`, however a bug in the implementation prevents it
        /// from working properly. https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/13211 fixes this.
        term: []const u8 = "xterm-ghostty",

however, that was addressed over a year ago, and it's unlikely that there are
any users of vim who both care about the feature and will use ghostty.

grep'ing through the source code shows me a lot of other things to dispute.

(I took a quick try at vttest on arch, but ghostty hung - spits out a lot
of error messages - ymmv)

--
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
https://invisible-island.net