[Simh] xterm and simh

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Sat May 16 14:12:21 EDT 2020



> On May 16, 2020, at 11:06 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> Sounds like your problem is that TPU thinks your terminal understands 8-bit control characters, while it actually doesn't.

If VMS is like RSTS, there is an "8 bit characters" setting but no separate 8-bit controls setting, and presumably programs assume the former implies the latter.  After all, it does with DEC's terminals.

> Ctrl+Left click should show a menu entry "8-bit controls", which is the corresponding thing on the xterm side.
> 
> However, to properly answer your question, we'd need to know a lot more about your environment. And it's a bit hard to even ask the right questions here, because xterm is so flexible that you can accomplish a lot of stuff in multiple ways, and you might not even know what you are doing... And VMS tries to figure out what your terminal is, and depending on various details, xterm will identify in different ways, which is what VMS then base its settings on...

As Johnny also pointed out, be sure not to have xterm set for UTF-8.  Not just because of 8-bit controls, but also because DEC applications are unlikely to know about it; they normally assume DEC MCS (a.k.a., DEC Std 169).  Latin-1 is a good approximation though not identical.

	paul




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