On Sat, 19 Feb 2000, darkelf wrote:

> I want to run BitchX and ircII-EPIC and see the ansi color and
> characters

Well, as you may have gathered, getting any color at all on a Macintosh is
rather tricky.  so it's certainly something nobody has bothered to write
into the console terminal, since it is supposed to be a simple and
bug-free error reporting medium and nothing more.

If you get Color X working, the regular xterm program will support ANSI
color.  I think it even defaults to having this feature ``on,'' but if not
you can type 'man xterm' and search for ANSI.

You'll also find eterm, kterm, wterm, and rxvt in pkgsrc, some of which
might support ANSI color, too.

> when I try ncftp in visual mode, I get an error saying that it cant
> open the environment and quits.

I cannot explain this, but it would be a good idea to search for the
problem in realms outside your terminal configuration.  Typically when a
program needs at least a Q-ish terminal and it has an R terminal instead,
it displays garbage.  but, it never realizes it's on the wrong terminal
and thus doesn't quit with an error.

It's almost true that the only feedback a program gets from its terminal
is an environment variable, TERM.  You must set this to the name of your
terminal, if it's not alraedy set.

$ TERM=vt220
$ export TERM

-or-

% setenv TERM vt220

FWIW I was never a fan of ncftp _at all_.  The ftp built into NetBSD is
considerably enhanced over what most Unix provides.  It may not have all
the features that ncftp has, but it does have some of them.  It also has
an additional feature:  it actually works, and does so consistently.  so,
if you haven't tried it already you might check it out.

but, you ought to at least be able to get ncftp to come up in visual mode.
I doubt ncftp is _that_ broken, since if it didn't look good no one would
use it.

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:+1 720 841-8308 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US