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[APi]TheMan · Feb 9, 2002, 01:41 PM

I have heard that the reason applications like BitchX that use lots of color in their displays look funny in Terminal.app is because of MacOSX's termcap. Is this some thing that Apple plans on fixing or improving in the future? BitchX looks horrid when run in the Terminal.app.

rkt · Feb 10, 2002, 10:27 AM

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
I have heard that the reason applications like BitchX that use lots of color in their displays look funny in Terminal.app is because of MacOSX's termcap. Is this some thing that Apple plans on fixing or improving in the future?

well, http://www.opensource.apple.com/bugs...s/2259467.html seems to track this issue, but nothing has changed on it for a while. i believe that jaguar has libcurses replaced by ncurses; this might help. *shrug*

[ 02-10-2002: Message edited by: rkt ]

Maneki Neko · Feb 10, 2002, 06:04 PM

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
I have heard that the reason applications like BitchX that use lots of color in their displays look funny in Terminal.app is because of MacOSX's termcap. Is this some thing that Apple plans on fixing or improving in the future? BitchX looks horrid when run in the Terminal.app.

The only problem I have is the ASCII art. As a newcomer to the Mac world, do most Mac fonts have the extended ASCII characters?

gorgonzola · Feb 11, 2002, 12:12 AM

BitchX is fine if you have ncurses installed, although IMHO the client isn't that good.

[APi]TheMan · Feb 11, 2002, 10:38 AM

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
BitchX is fine if you have ncurses installed, although IMHO the client isn't that good.

BitchX is fine for me if I SSH or Telnet into my box, but if I am using it in Terminal.app I get lots of question marks and weirdo characters all over. And colors are all messed up. It's really hard to see what's going on.

In my opinion, BitchX ISN'T that good of a client... I just use it for the low overhead and because it's a command line application.

Archangel · Feb 11, 2002, 01:07 PM

It looks fine to me. Of course it doesn't have the slickness of a GUI app.

At macosx.forked.net it listed the ncurses lib as a required lib.

[APi]TheMan · Feb 11, 2002, 09:20 PM

Originally posted by Archangel:
It looks fine to me. Of course it doesn't have the slickness of a GUI app.

At macosx.forked.net it listed the ncurses lib as a required lib.

Wow, all these people say it looks fine for them, yet for me it looks like crap. Lemme get a screenshot or two up... it's hideous looking.

I am fairly positive that I installed ncurses, but I could be wrong. And I can't remember if I used a pre-complied binary or compiled it myself... hmmm.

[APi]TheMan · Feb 11, 2002, 09:36 PM

Check these out and see if you can tell what's going on. This first one here is the BitchX boot up message/ASCII picture:

... And this second one is of the BitchX About screen (/about):

Now I don't know what the hell is going on, but everyone seems to think BitchX runs fine for them and looks decent... mine doesn't, unless this looks decent to you

[edit: changed host of images again]

[ 02-13-2002: Message edited by: [APi]TheMan ]

[APi]TheMan · Feb 12, 2002, 05:33 PM

For example... right now I am at my school in my AP Computer Science class, using a PC. I am logged into my MacOSX box at home through the ssh program "putty" for WIndows. Look at this screenshot from BitchX's intro screen:

The colors are awesome

[edit: changed host of image]

[ 02-13-2002: Message edited by: [APi]TheMan ]

kidtexas · Feb 12, 2002, 09:02 PM

Sounds similar to a problem i was/am having with nethack. Nethack looks fine (with the DEC graphics mode turned on) when logging in remotely, both with Putty and xterm from a Sun. It also looks fine when i tried GLterm once. However, Terminal is not capable of displaying some of the "graphics" characters, so i have to run Nethack with the DEC graphics mode off when I play through Terminal. If I don't, what should be straight lines and corners (for walls) comes up as screwy stuff.

dark3lf · Feb 13, 2002, 10:10 AM

I'm running a patched ncurses 5.2 and BitchX 1.0c19 with Crack Rock script in GLterm 1.1. Works like a charm and I like it much better than all others.

[ 02-13-2002: Message edited by: dark3lf ]

[APi]TheMan · Feb 13, 2002, 10:35 AM

Are the pictures that I posted showing up? I originally had them on my iDisk, and they worked fine... then they stopped working, so I moved them to my Geocities account, then they didn't work. Now I put them back on my iDisk. Grrr.

Originally posted by dark3lf:
I'm running a patched ncurses 5.2 and BitchX 1.0c19 with Crack Rock script in GLterm 1.1. Works like a charm and I like it much better than all others.

Where'd you get the patched ncurses? And what are they patched for? ehhehe. fink shows that ncurses are installed, I think:
<BLOCKQUOTE>code:<HR><pre>
[localhost:~] aorth% fink list | grep "ncurses"
i ncurses 5.2-6 Full-screen ascii drawing library
[/code]

So I don't know what's up. I'll try GLTerm, though.

dark3lf · Feb 13, 2002, 12:53 PM

Here is the file. You can get the one listed in the root directory, it's already patched, but updates are in the patches directory.

kidtexas · Feb 13, 2002, 01:32 PM

I will say it again. It appears that GLTerm does this kinda thing correctly, while Terminal doesn't. I for one would like to get Terminal displaying properly...

[APi]TheMan · Feb 13, 2002, 07:36 PM

Originally posted by dark3lf:
I'm running a patched ncurses 5.2 and BitchX 1.0c19 with Crack Rock script in GLterm 1.1. Works like a charm and I like it much better than all others.

I downloaded that 1.0c19 binary, and when I tried to ./BitchX it, the program was SO jacked up looking in Terminal.app as well as MacSSH and Putty, the latter two which normally look gorgeous. This must mean that my ncurses are effed up I guess. I'll try downloading your ncurses and see what goes on. Thanks.

[APi]TheMan · Feb 14, 2002, 02:18 AM

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:


I downloaded that 1.0c19 binary, and when I tried to ./BitchX it, the program was SO jacked up looking in Terminal.app as well as MacSSH and Putty, the latter two which normally look gorgeous. This must mean that my ncurses are effed up I guess. I'll try downloading your ncurses and see what goes on. Thanks.

I was talking to some friends on #macdcc, and they suggested that I change the "String Encoding"... Terminal.app --> Preferences --> Shell --> String Encoding --> "MacOS Roman".

This fixed the majority of the problems, but the colors are still jacked up. There are no longer weird ass characters all over the screen

So much trouble to such and EASY solution.

dark3lf · Feb 14, 2002, 10:18 AM

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:


I downloaded that 1.0c19 binary, and when I tried to ./BitchX it, the program was SO jacked up looking in Terminal.app as well as MacSSH and Putty, the latter two which normally look gorgeous. This must mean that my ncurses are effed up I guess. I'll try downloading your ncurses and see what goes on. Thanks.

Really? Can you take a screenshot of it? I really didn't do anything special in compiling it, and that screenshot above is 1.0c19. And yes, I did compile it with ncurses. If you compile a plain vanilla ncurses from GNU, some of the libraries don't build and others are broken.

gorgonzola · Feb 14, 2002, 05:22 PM

Try saving the following as ~/.termcap and then running BitchX again:

<BLOCKQUOTE>code:<HR><pre># Apple_Terminal
d0|vt100|vt100-am|vt100am|dec vt100

a#64:Co#8:Sf=\E[3%dm:Sb=\E[4%dm :op=\E[m:AF=\E[3%dm:AB=\E[4%dm

:do=^J:co#80:li#24:cl=\E[;H\E[2J:sf=2*\ED

:le=^H:bs:am:cm=5\E[%i%d;%dH:nd=2\E[C:up=2\E[A

:ce=3\E[K:cd=50\E[J:so=2\E[7m:se=2\E[m:us=2\E[4m:ue=2\E[m

:md=2\E[1m:mr=2\E[7m:mb=2\E[5m:me=2\E[m

:rf=/usr/share/tabset/vt100

:rs=\E>\E[?3l\E[?4l\E[?5l\E[?7h\E[?8h\E[;r\E[0m\E(B\E)B\E[2J

:ks=\E[?1h\E=:ke=\E[?1l\E>

:ku=\EOA:kd=\EOB:kr=\EOC:kl=\EOD:kb=^H

:ho=\E[H:k1=\EOP:k2=\EOQ:k3=\EOR:k4=\EOS

t:sr=2*\EM:vt#3:xn

:sc=\E7:rc=\E8:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:[/code]

That *should* help it work better...

[APi]TheMan · Feb 14, 2002, 05:46 PM

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
Try saving the following as ~/.termcap and then running BitchX again:

I would try that, but for some reason my BitchX isn't working... I am SSH'd into my box from class here, and it seems that BitchX is gone... This is weird... Ah! The funny thing is, when I run a ps -aux | grep "BitchX" I come up with an instance running (the same one that I always leave connected to #macdcc on slashnet.) So I'll have to see what's going on when I get home to my box.

Well, I suppose this could mean that I need to reformat and build my OSX install again. I have compiled and sudo make install a lot of things over the last few months, and I think that there is too much crap installed and I suppose that it wouldn't hurt to start from scratch. Look at the positive side, at least I'll get a very good feel of the OS again, just like I have developed for OS9 and below from wiping the system and starting clean. By the way, is there something I can do to uninstall this crap? I don't even know what or where it is, nor where all their related files are.

Unfortunately, this ain't OS9... and there is a lot more customization that is involved. Maybe I'll just re-compile BitchX and wait till 10.1.3 comes out for my reformat...

[edit: removed MacNN's lame auto-formatting of code segments with HTML tags. Grrr.]

[ 02-14-2002: Message edited by: [APi]TheMan ]

Mike the Knife · Feb 14, 2002, 08:10 PM

I'm having the same problem, but even more problems. Something seems to be weird with BitchX for me. Randomly, it says "servers exhausted" and starts trying to connect to irc.bitchx.com.

So not only am I looking to fix the whole ANSI char problem, but I need a new install anyway.

Anyway, I tried to install dark3lf's ncurses or whatever, and during the make process I got a ton of warnings, and then it just stopped. It didn't say that the make was complete or whatever, it just stopped. I tried to run the binary he linked and I get this error:

dyld: ./BitchX can't open library: /usr/local/lib/libdl.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2)

Sure enough, libdl.dylib wasn't in /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib, so I'm not exactly sure what my problem is. I've installed the ncurses package at macosx.forked.net AND through fink several times and uninstalled as well.

Can anyone suggest anything? Can I completely uninstall ALL traces of ncurses from all three packages (fink/forked.net/dark3lfs)? If so, how? And what else could I do to get a clean install of ncurses and a working BitchX?

[APi]TheMan · Feb 15, 2002, 11:07 AM

Originally posted by Mike the Knife:
I'm having the same problem, but even more problems. Something seems to be weird with BitchX for me. Randomly, it says "servers exhausted" and starts trying to connect to irc.bitchx.com.

About this, have you tried connecting to any other servers besides the default BitchX server? I'll look at the other questions you had and try to help later, I have to get to school.

Mike the Knife · Feb 15, 2002, 01:16 PM

Actually, that was just a mistake on my part I think. In my .bitchxrc I didn't have autorejoin and autoconnect set to off.

The only thing I'm experiencing now is if I'm away for a long time... I type /back, and I'm disconnected. It's weird.

Anyway, thanks to a reaaalllly helpful fellow in #MacOSX on efnet, I have a new binary that's compiled without ANSI. It skips the ansi intro, and instead of the "uiu" it shows "-:-", which is a lot nicer.

If anyone wants it, feel free to email me at [email protected].

[APi]TheMan · Feb 15, 2002, 10:04 PM

Originally posted by Mike the Knife:
Actually, that was just a mistake on my part I think. In my .bitchxrc I didn't have autorejoin and autoconnect set to off.

The only thing I'm experiencing now is if I'm away for a long time... I type /back, and I'm disconnected. It's weird.

Anyway, thanks to a reaaalllly helpful fellow in #MacOSX on efnet, I have a new binary that's compiled without ANSI. It skips the ansi intro, and instead of the "uiu" it shows "-:-", which is a lot nicer.

If anyone wants it, feel free to email me at [email protected].

I just reformatted my hard drive. I was getting sick of all the crap I had installed and forgot about. I have to recompile all my crap... The ANSI stuff is annoying sometimes on OSX, but from a remote terminal session, it's cool.

Feb 17, 2002, 02:26 PM

You're talking about a number of different problems here: one, the text encoding -- that's what makes all the weird characters; two, the colours -- these will look much better on a dark grey Terminal background; three is similar to the colours: it is fixed by editing ~/.BitchX/BitchX.formats. Figure out the BX colour codes from here and edit the BitchX.formats with help from there and looking at the file, too. You might have to do /save in BX, first, though. And about the process running, BX might have automatically done a /detach or something, which you can fix by doing the command scr-bx. To fix the text encoding, just go into the Terminal preferences and set the text encoding to something else (whatever the other terminals are using) -- also in the Terminal preferences, you can edit the background colour / text colour / selection colour / et cetera.

[APi]TheMan · Feb 17, 2002, 03:56 PM

Originally posted by Mike the Knife:
[snip]
dyld: ./BitchX can't open library: /usr/local/lib/libdl.dylib (No such file or directory, errno = 2)
[/snip]

You need to install libdl

Download it from http://macosx.forked.net/showcat.php...method=reverse That should fix your problems.