Strange symbol in vim command line after start

Question

I'm using Kubuntu 15.10, konsole and vim. When I initially start vim in konsole, i get strange symbols ("115;0c") in my command line, which is really annoying.

i tried "set term=konsole" setting in my .vimrc but i got this

E558: Terminal entry not found in terminfo
'konsole' not known. Available builtin terminals are:
    builtin_gui
    builtin_amiga
    builtin_beos-ansi
    builtin_ansi
    builtin_pcansi
    builtin_win32
    builtin_vt320
    builtin_vt52
    builtin_xterm
    builtin_iris-ansi
    builtin_debug
    builtin_dumb
defaulting to 'ansi'

but all of these options were annoying, because i got "trace" after closing quiting vim.

Does anyone have the same problem? I'd appreciate any help.

Sounds like your terminfo setup is hosed -- maybe reinstall the `ncurses-base` package (which should be a prereq of vim) — Chris Dodd, Apr 19 '16 at 22:55

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 19 '16 at 14:32

That usually indicates an incorrect TERM environment variable setting -- when vim starts up, it generates a number of terminal configuration commands base on the TERM setting to configure the terminal. If the TERM setting is wrong, it may generate an incorrect setting string that gets displayed like this.

For a konsole window, TERM should be set to konsole.

Thomas Dickey · Answer 2 · 2023-08-15T22:26:01.430

The problem was that konsole was pretending to be xterm, and confused vim. That "115;0c" was intended (by konsole's developer) to look like the response to xterm's secondary device response. In particular, konsole was pretending to be xterm patch #115, by sending this response:

Escape[1;115;0c

konsole, like all of the xterm-wannbes, differs from xterm in ways that affect any application using terminfo (this is of course an FAQ).

The actual code:

void Vt102Emulation::reportSecondaryAttributes()
{   
    // Secondary device attribute response (Request was: ^[[>0c or ^[[>c)
    if (getMode(MODE_Ansi)) {
        sendString("\033[>1;115;0c"); // Why 115?  ;)
    } else {
        sendString("\033/Z"); // FIXME I don't think VT52 knows about it but kept for
    }
    // konsoles backward compatibility.
}

dates back to this commit:

commit 2d93fed82aa27e89c9d7301d09d2e24e4fa4416d
Author: Waldo Bastian <bastian@kde.org>
Date:   Sat Sep 15 21:21:44 2001 +0000

    proper impl. of primary/secondary device attributes (DA)
    Patch by Achim Bohnet <ach@mpe.mpg.de>
 
    svn path=/trunk/kdebase/konsole/; revision=114396
 
diff --git a/konsole/TEmuVt102.cpp b/konsole/TEmuVt102.cp

There is a "konsole" entry in the optional ncurses-term package (see source). That requires a few megabytes. The required ncurses-base package is much smaller:

This package contains terminfo data files to support the most common types of terminal, including ansi, dumb, linux, rxvt, screen, sun, vt100, vt102, vt220, vt52, and xterm.

which is a little odd, because very few people have actually used ansi, sun, or vt52 within the past 20 years, except by accident or when following poor advice.

Strange symbol in vim command line after start

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