Visual artifacts when running in some terminal emulators

[Олег Андриянов]

Hi!

Recently I have built fresh vim 8.2 to use it's embedded terminal feature, and I started to notice some weird artifacts when inserting text. It's like vim forgets to redraw the screen or something. For example, here is a screenshot right after I run "vim-8.2 -u NONE" and hit "i" to start inserting text:

https://i.imgur.com/mHq18Ni.png

Note that I didn't actually enter anything after hitting "i". Also note that welcome screen text is still present on the screen — it must disappear when you switch to the insert mode. When I hit Ctrl+L, the artifacts disappear, but they come back every time I start inserting.

I observe the problem only when I run vim inside terminator. When I use xterm, everything works fine. It also works well when I run vim inside GNU screen. There is no such issue with vim version 8.0.197 running inside the same terminator.

I really like new features of vim 8.2. How can I work around this glitches, besides always starting vim inside GNU screen?

[Tony Mechelynck]

Hm. My guess is that your Terminator executable pretends to be an
xterm but doesn't act 100% like one, and that you hit one of those
corner cases when it doesn't.

Vim works well, and doesn't show those spurious characters, in the
following circumstances:
- when run as gvim (i.e. as a GUI)
- when run in a "true" xterm
- when run in a pseudo xterm which really mimics the behaviour of a
true xterm. My konsole terminal (version 18.12.3) is one. There are
others.

Myself, I don't use Terminator, but maybe someone else (who does) is
reading this.

Best regards,
Tony.

[rob]

I use terminator on  ubuntu.  I've been compiling my self from source
for about a year, so I'm now using 8.2.52, compiled this morning.

I have not seen any issues or video artifacts at all when using vim from
within terminator.  I also use guake; also, no issues or video artifacts.

I don't know if this matters, but no matter what I've tried, I cannot
get the binary to have lua.  So my vim still shows "-lua"

--rob solomon

[Олег Андриянов]

Hi,

Just in case anyone has the same issue, I found that unsetting options t_TI and t_TE helps, so I put these two lines into my ~/.vimrc and everything seems to work fine so far:

```

set t_TI=

set t_TE=

```

Apparently Terminator indeed does not support some xterm-specific control sequences.