unsuitable_terminal.md

Unsuitable Terminal

ghostty is a new formidable terminal emulator. I wanted to try it out, but when I attempted to SSH to some remote hosts I got the following error:

missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-ghostty

I did some googling and found a blog post, which suggested 3 different workarounds.

One was updating term_info on the remote host, this is somewhat cumbersome and not something I wanted to maintain going forward with updates on the remote host.

Second was by the blog post author and involved changing the TERM environment variable to something more recognisable than: xterm-ghostty.

[[ "$TERM_PROGRAM" == "ghostty" ]]; then
    export TERM=xterm-256color

The last one, which I chose to go with was changing my SSH configuration on my local machine, so the environment variable was set as part of the SSH configuration:

SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color

The last part works like a charm as sort of does the same as the second one.

Resources and References

• vNinja.net: "Ghostty — Workaround for Missing or Unsuitable Terminal xterm-ghostty"