[vim/vim] The "defaulting to 'ansi'" message becomes very annoying quickly and doesn't tell me how to disable it (Issue #21221)
Ellie
ell1e created an issue (vim/vim#21221)Is your feature request about something that is currently impossible or hard to do? Please describe the problem.
Needing to wait a long moment to stare at this message for every vim launch:
E558: Terminal entry not found in terminfo
'foot' not known. Available builtin terminals are:
builtin_ansi
builtin_vt320
builtin_vt52
builtin_xterm
builtin_iris-ansi
builtin_pcansi
builtin_win32
builtin_amiga
builtin_dumb
builtin_debug
defaulting to 'ansi'
...quickly becomes infuriating. I would therefore like to suggest that this message should clearly state what I should put into .vimrc to disable this. I personally simply don't care what terminal mode it uses, and I've seen the warning the first time. I understand it might be important to other users so I'm not suggesting its removal, but making it more obvious how to turn this off would be amazing.
Describe the solution you'd like
The message itself should state what should I do if I don't care and I don't want to see this again. I'm guessing a .vimrc option would be the most natural way to address it, but ideally the message itself should tell me what to put into .vimrc if I don't care.
Describe alternatives you've considered
I suppose an alternative could be not showing the message in the first place, but I'm assuming other users find it important.
Additional context
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dezza
dezza left a comment (vim/vim#21221)you need foot-terminfo package installed, this is not a vim issue.
it sounds like you either ignored recommended packages or you installed the package from community packages or manually compiled and forgot to install terminfo.
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Éric NICOLAS
ccjmne left a comment (vim/vim#21221)To be clear, you do care, actually, so long as you might ever use, say Backspace and expect it to work. Or <C-Left>, <A-Up>, <F5>, <Home>... or want focus reporting. Or mouse support. Or specific colours, italic text, underlines, bracketed paste, etc...
I suspect the more accurate reality is that you don't know why you should care :-)
@dezza's suggestion and diagnosis are on point: the best effort at finding a lowest common denominator has covered by chance everything you wanted from Vim so far, but the fix isn't to silently fall back to "whatever protocol".
It is indeed "not a Vim issue", but more than this: Vim isn't the only tool you're running that's running completely blind. You might find that other broken bits of UI on your machine (or through SSH?) suddenly become quite less broken when you finish installing your terminal emulator.
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Ellie
ell1e left a comment (vim/vim#21221)I use CTRL+C and backspace all the time with no problems. It might surprise you, but some vim users really are that basic (I'm happy to admit that).
I realize there might be a way to fix this, but I simply wanted to suggest vim should offer me to not care. When I'm opening vim I'm not looking to debug a terminfo install, I just want to change a few lines in a config. For simple vim uses, this is enough.
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dezza
dezza left a comment (vim/vim#21221)@ell1e not caring about it is undefined behaviour as terminal detection is a foundational part of how vim works. In other words its unsupported, hence the warning.
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Éric NICOLAS
ccjmne left a comment (vim/vim#21221)I was sure Ctrl-A through Z (and quite a few others) would work even in plain ANSI mode, but I'm surprised about Backspace! Thanks for the information @ell1e :-)
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Ellie
ell1e left a comment (vim/vim#21221)Feel free to close the issue if you think this is out of scope. I still think it would be a good fit since vim's general agenda seems to be to get out of the users way. Perhaps there's also a scenario I can't think of where it might be useful to be able to override this detection, that's less haphazard than "I don't want to deal with this right now"?
An interesting related anecdote, on one of my machines for some reason I get some interrupt message that overwrites part of the vim UI in a clearly unintended manner whenever I press CTRL+C, although that was with a supported terminal with no terminfo warning ever. From the point on I noticed that it doesn't actually affect the functionality, I never bothered to fix it. It's really just a matter of priorities for some of us.
(But similarly, I would understand if you felt like you had other priorities than to ever add an option to bypass this.)
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dezza
dezza left a comment (vim/vim#21221)WARNING: Definetily not supported
If you ignore all good practises and warnings you can force a somewhat standard term like
TERM=xterm or TERM=xterm-256color or alias vim with alias vim='TERM=xterm-256color vim' which is what most terminals target.
But it makes debugging issues extremely hard - don't open another issue with that set later.
Installing the terminfo for your terminal is the proper way - there's a reason why they ship one, because they extend an existing like xterm or handles things differently.
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Ellie
ell1e left a comment (vim/vim#21221)Thank you! A vim-specific option would be a little more useful, but since I'm guessing there's no interest it's probably best if I close this.
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