Re: color ls on xterm and hpterm

[Bob Proulx]

A timewarp back to July.  Sorry about that.  I meant to answer this
then but just now saw it again.

> We have a mixed environment of HP and Sun workstations.  Some folks,
> on their HP workstations, prefer to use hpterms, instead of the
> regular terminal.  Also, we sometimes use xterms.

Note that hpterms use a completely different model of operation than
xterms.  It comes from the old days of mainframes when you edit your
form and them submitted it for processing versus using a timesharing
system.  Ah, those were not the days.  But the hp2645 had probably the
best keyboard feel of any keyboard I have ever used.

> I've added hpterm and xterm to the dircolors configuration file,
> which allows the dircolors command to spit out the shell command for
> setting the LS_COLORS environment variable.  When I do a listing,
> however, it doesn't seem to work.  It's not a problem at all, when
> using a terminal, with a variety of term settings.  But, hpterms and
> xterms seem to be a problem.
> 
> The xterms seem to bold the areas that should be different colors.
> It's possibly because xterms, by default, don't display in colors??

Xterm is an old program and did not originally support color.  But
color support *has* been added.  Unfortunately HP does not ship
anything recent.  You will have to replace it with a more modern
version in order to get color.

The quite recent xterm version 159 almost works out of the box.  I
highly recommend getting at least that version.  Relative to 159 there
were two minor bugs that slipped into their release in the terminfo
files.  I see that 161 is now available in the last few days.  Perhaps
those are fixed there but even if not they were obvious to repair.

  ftp://dickey.his.com:21/xterm/

If things are not obvious I am sure I can answer further particular
questions about xterm on hpux.

Bob