term(7) Miscellaneous term(7)
NAME
term - conventions for naming terminal types
DESCRIPTION
The environment variable TERM should normally contain the type name of
the terminal, console or display-device type you are using. This
information is critical for all screen-oriented programs, including your
editor and mailer.
A default TERM value will be set on a per-line basis by either
/etc/inittab (e.g., System-V-like Unices) or /etc/ttys (BSD Unices).
This will nearly always suffice for workstation and microcomputer
consoles.
If you use a dialup line, the type of device attached to it may vary.
Older Unix systems pre-set a very dumb terminal type like "dumb" or
"dialup" on dialup lines. Newer ones may pre-set "vt100", reflecting the
prevalence of DEC VT100-compatible terminals and personal-computer
emulators.
Modern telnets pass your TERM environment variable from the local side to
the remote one. There can be problems if the remote terminfo or termcap
entry for your type is not compatible with yours, but this situation is
rare and can almost always be avoided by explicitly exporting "vt100"
(assuming you are in fact using a VT100-superset console, terminal, or
terminal emulator).
In any case, you are free to override the system TERM setting to your
taste in your shell profile. The tset(1) utility may be of assistance;
you can give it a set of rules for deducing or requesting a terminal type
based on the tty device and baud rate.
Setting your own TERM value may also be useful if you have created a
custom entry incorporating options (such as visual bell or reverse-video)
which you wish to override the system default type for your line.
Terminal type descriptions are stored as files of capability data
underneath /usr/share/misc/terminfo. To browse a list of all terminal
names recognized by the system, do
toe | more
from your shell. These capability files are in a binary format optimized
for retrieval speed (unlike the old text-based termcap format they
replace); to examine an entry, you must use the infocmp(1M) command.
Invoke it as follows:
infocmp entry_name
where entry_name is the name of the type you wish to examine (and the
name of its capability file the subdirectory of /usr/share/misc/terminfo
named for its first letter). This command dumps a capability file in the
text format described by terminfo(5).
The first line of a terminfo(5) description gives the names by which
terminfo knows a terminal, separated by "|" (pipe-bar) characters with
the last name field terminated by a comma. The first name field is the
type's primary name, and is the one to use when setting TERM. The last
name field (if distinct from the first) is actually a description of the
terminal type (it may contain blanks; the others must be single words).
Name fields between the first and last (if present) are aliases for the
terminal, usually historical names retained for compatibility.
There are some conventions for how to choose terminal primary names that
help keep them informative and unique. Here is a step-by-step guide to
naming terminals that also explains how to parse them:
First, choose a root name. The root will consist of a lower-case letter
followed by up to seven lower-case letters or digits. You need to avoid
using punctuation characters in root names, because they are used and
interpreted as filenames and shell meta-characters (such as !, $, *, ?,
etc.) embedded in them may cause odd and unhelpful behavior. The slash
(/), or any other character that may be interpreted by anyone's file
system (\, $, [, ]), is especially dangerous (terminfo is platform-
independent, and choosing names with special characters could someday
make life difficult for users of a future port). The dot (.) character
is relatively safe as long as there is at most one per root name; some
historical terminfo names use it.
The root name for a terminal or workstation console type should almost
always begin with a vendor prefix (such as hp for Hewlett-Packard, wy for
Wyse, or att for AT&T terminals), or a common name of the terminal line
(vt for the VT series of terminals from DEC, or sun for Sun Microsystems
workstation consoles, or regent for the ADDS Regent series. You can list
the terminfo tree to see what prefixes are already in common use. The
root name prefix should be followed when appropriate by a model number;
thus vt100, hp2621, wy50.
The root name for a PC-Unix console type should be the OS name, i.e.,
linux, bsdos, freebsd, netbsd. It should not be console or any other
generic that might cause confusion in a multi-platform environment! If a
model number follows, it should indicate either the OS release level or
the console driver release level.
The root name for a terminal emulator (assuming it does not fit one of
the standard ANSI or vt100 types) should be the program name or a readily
recognizable abbreviation of it (i.e., versaterm, ctrm).
Following the root name, you may add any reasonable number of hyphen-
separated feature suffixes.
2p Has two pages of memory. Likewise 4p, 8p, etc.
mc Magic-cookie. Some terminals (notably older Wyses) can only support
one attribute without magic-cookie lossage. Their base entry is
usually paired with another that has this suffix and uses magic
cookies to support multiple attributes.
-am Enable auto-margin (right-margin wraparound).
-m Mono mode - suppress color support.
-na No arrow keys - termcap ignores arrow keys which are actually there
on the terminal, so the user can use the arrow keys locally.
-nam No auto-margin - suppress am capability.
-nl No labels - suppress soft labels.
-nsl No status line - suppress status line.
-pp Has a printer port which is used.
-rv Terminal in reverse video mode (black on white).
-s Enable status line.
-vb Use visible bell (flash) rather than beep.
-w Wide; terminal is in 132-column mode.
Conventionally, if your terminal type is a variant intended to specify a
line height, that suffix should go first. So, for a hypothetical FuBarCo
model 2317 terminal in 30-line mode with reverse video, best form would
be fubar-30-rv (rather than, say, "fubar-rv-30").
Terminal types that are written not as standalone entries, but rather as
components to be plugged into other entries via use capabilities, are
distinguished by using embedded plus signs rather than dashes.
Commands which use a terminal type to control display often accept a -T
option that accepts a terminal name argument. Such programs should fall
back on the TERM environment variable when no -T option is specified.
FILES
/usr/share/misc/terminfo
compiled terminal description database
/etc/inittab
tty line initialization (AT&T-like Unices)
/etc/ttys
tty line initialization (BSD-like Unices)
PORTABILITY
For maximum compatibility with older System V Unices, names and aliases
should be unique within the first 14 characters.
SEE ALSO
curses(3X), term(5), terminfo(5)
ncurses 6.6 2025-08-16 term(7)