Investigating the Konsole Term String in Kubuntu 16.10

Determine $TERM String

Multiple ways:

$ echo $TERM
xterm
$ ps -p$PPID
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 2482 ?        00:07:46 konsole

I'm running these commands on an installation of Kubuntu 16.10:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.10
Release:        16.10
Codename:       yakkety

KDE version:

$ konsole --version
Qt: 5.6.1
KDE Frameworks: 5.28.0
Konsole: 16.04.3

Terminfo is a data base describing terminals, used by screen-oriented programs such as nvi(1), rogue(1) and libraries such as ncurses(3NCURSES(ncurses version 6.0 (patch 20160625))). Terminfo describes terminals by giving a set of capabilities which they have, by specifying how to perform screen operations, and by specifying padding requirements and initialization sequences.

man 5 terminfo

Check if $TERM is being overwritten by shell startup scripts (.bashrc, .bash_profile.

Run the msgcat --color=testTest To Test Capabilities of the Terminal

$ msgcat --color=test
The program 'msgcat' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt install gettext
$ sudo apt install gettext
...

Once installed, run the test:

Screenshot of the msgcat --color=test command being run in Konsole on Kubuntu 16.10.

Helpful links:

  • A helfpul manpage describing terminfo: man 5 terminfo

Tags

 Linux  Ubuntu  KDE  Ubuntu 16.10  kubuntu  Kubuntu 16.10  term  konsole  term-string