Consider clearing the TERM variable

[rprichard]

See #23. Clearing the TERM and PAGER variables fixed that problem, but perhaps winpty's console.exe utility ought to clear TERM. This behavior probably doesn't belong in the agent or DLL.

I don't think winpty should be clearing PAGER, even though it was necessary to fix #23.

[rprichard]

I noticed that both IntelliJ and Eclipse set TERM on Windows. IntelliJ sets it to xterm-256color and Eclipse's TM Terminal plugin sets it to xterm.

[CMCDragonkai]

Perhaps, alias console="env TERM= PAGER= console"? Or some variation of that?

[rprichard]

Perhaps, alias console="env TERM= PAGER= console"? Or some variation of that?

That command should typically do the right thing, given IronPython's behavior as of July 2014. I'm a bit suspicious of that IronPython behavior, but it was almost two years ago, so maybe it's changed.

Clearing TERM like that is a bit dodgy. If a Cygwin program (like console.exe) is started inside a Windows console, and if TERM is unset, then Cygwin itself apparently sets TERM to cygwin automatically at startup. This scenario shouldn't typically happen, though, because there's little reason to run console.exe inside an already-existing console.

I think a good argument can be made that winpty itself ought to clear TERM, though, and do so by default. winpty creates a console and adapts its I/O to the outer terminal, which is frequently TERM=xterm, but could be something else. It's plausible that winpty could someday examine the outer TERM variable to adjust the translation (to deal with this issue, for example), and if it does, then env TERM= console will communicate the wrong information to winpty. Regardless, the program running under winpty should not see TERM=xterm, because it's not meaningfully connected to an xterm--it's connected to a Windows console.

In other words, when console.exe is starting, the TERM variable should indicate the kind of terminal that winpty is running under, and when the program under winpty starts, its TERM should be clear, because it's not running under a Unix-like terminal.

[rprichard]

See also: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-155071

[rprichard]

See https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=496291 too.