Re: xterm et al - window is cleared after less etc

[Shaun McCance <shaunm wolfram com>]

On Thu, 2003-07-03 at 11:05, Jan wrote:
> Sorry to post this question to this list, but I'm not quite sure where
> to go; and anyway, it is probably something everybody here knows the
> answer to.
> 
> I am getting increasingly annoyed by this misfeature: when I leave a
> full screen application such as man, less or vi the screen is cleared,
> so I can't see what I was just looking at. I know there is a way to turn
> it off - but which? It goes away BTW when I set TERM to something else
> than xterm, but that is at best a bad workaround.

I don't know of any way to turn this off, other than the workaround of
setting your term.  The screen clearing is the intended behavior of
these programs.  It is generally regarded as a feature.  However, this
feature can't be performed by all terminal types, so the programs only
clear the screen if the terminal supports it.  (The relevant capability
is cl in termcap and clear in terminfo.)  That's why setting your TERM
environment variable works.

If the hackish workaround of setting TERM is the only way (and it's the
only way that I know of), the best way to do it would be to create your
own terminal type based on xterm, but without cl or clear.  You could
then register this with termcap/terminfo, and set TERM to this new
terminal type.  This way you don't lose other xterm capabilities.

--
Shaun