Tag Archives: vt220

Common Problems When Configuring the InetVTx00 Emulator

My function keys do not work

Depending on the termcap or terminfo file on your specific Unix host (and what is used by your application on the Unix box), you might need to change the definitions for the function keys F1 to F12. These definitions are not standardized in the Unix world. The VT220, VT300 and SCO-ANSI terminals are a bit better in this regard than VT100 or ANSI.

We recommend to try a VT220 or VT300 as a first step. The terminal type string will also influence what the application expects from the key definitions.

If you need to fix only a few keys, one approach is to try all the F-keys with Alt, Ctrl and Shift combinations to see if some other key contains the definition you need. A better method would be to look at an existing working product, to see what the definition of that key should be. But the correct method is to examine the termcap, terminfo and applications on the Unix side to see what they need.

The screen layout is wrong

Problems with the screen layout might be caused by many configurable aspects. Various operating systems and their applications have different requirements that will affect how application’s screens appear in the InetVTx00 emulator screen. Unfortunately it is impossible for us to supply a golden bullet that will work everywhere.

Please play around with these settings on the Setup | Settings dialog: the number of lines on the screen (24 or 25), the wrapping and CR/LF translations. They will solve most problems. The only other common mistake is to select the wrong screen font. The line draw characters (for boxes on the text screens) are mapped differently in different fonts. We recommend Inet or Terminal fonts. In rare cases a Courier font will also work. Do not use a proportional font like Arial or Times Roman.

To change the size of your terminal screen, first change the size of your screen font. Then you may use the View | Resize option to set the screen size optimised for your selected font.

Less common problems may relate to the VT/SCO/Ansi settings. We recommend VT on, SCO off and Ansi on for the most common scenarios. The “Scroll back Rows” is an enhancement and may confuse some applications. Set your Scroll back Rows to zero.

The color instructions sent from the server may vary depending on the terminal type used. Your terminal will only go into 132-column mode if the proper command was sent from the server. I.e.: Esc[?3h and to return to 80-column mode Esc[?3l

Once you are happy with the settings, you may save this configuration under a unique name and create a short cut to always launch and connect you to the selected host.

Hint: You may also create more than one shortcut (e.g. to connect to different hosts) using the same configuration.

Terminal Type and Configuration

Explanation of Terms

Winet comes with seven (7) terminal emulation programs: VTx00, 3270, 5250, T27, Uts60, HP, D211 (not all of them will be unlocked by your licence file). We like to call these the 7 different families of terminal emulators. Each program can be loaded with a configuration to specify some settings for this family to more closely emulate a certain old hardware terminal or to fit function key requirements of a specific application on the mainframe (or Unix server host).

E.g.: InetVTx00 comes with configurations to emulate VT100, VT220, VT300, ANSI, SCO-ANSI and a Linux console.

The title bar (top blue bar) of each emulator will display first the name of the Inet terminal emulation program and next the name of the active configuration.

Mostly when we talk of terminal type, we refer to the string (name) passed by telnet to the remote host (mainframe, server or Unix box), telling it which terminal you are using. This name will affect what type of instructions the host will send to your terminal and what it will expect of your terminal. The terminal type is a string that identifies the model of the terminal. The terminal type is one of the settings saved in a configuration and you may change it as required.

Depending on your Unix (or other) host, you might want to set the terminal type to something like vt220, VT100, ansi, ANSI or sco-ansi or whatever. (Unix is case sensitive.) A few popular options are listed in the drop down box under the Setup | Telnet | Terminal Type option in your terminal emulator, but you may also manually edit the strings as required.

You can easily create your own custom configurations by using the File | Save As option in your terminal emulator. You may have an unlimited number of configurations for each terminal emulator on your PC, connecting to the same or to different hosts (mainframes).

The configuration is used as a key in the registry to store all the settings for the emulator. The configuration to use is specified with the /t=configuration command line option in each short cut.

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