Being CS

Terminal Issues When Running Emacs on Sweet Hall Machines

Panther creates an issue when trying to log onto the Sweet Hall machines over ssh from Terminal.app and running full screen applications like Emacs. I will go over how to fix the problem and then explain it for those of you who are interested in why it doesn't work.
Log into a sweet hall machine and type setenv TERM vt100
Then type emacs .cshrc. Go to the last line of the file and type setenv TERM vt100. Then save the changes. From now on emacs will work again, but your local Terminal settings will stay unchanged.

The problem is that Panther changed the default terminal type from vt100 to xterm-color. When logging into Sweet Hall machines the terminal type is either what was set explicitly for those machines (by the user), or if not, the users local settings (from the mac). The Sweet machines do not know this new terminal type so they assume that the terminal is a dumb terminal (the standard fallback). Emacs, however, requires a so called "smart terminal" to get control of the entire screen. By setting the new terminal type we override the default taken from Panther, and make emacs work again.