I recently encountered an error where when I do a less in cygwin it goes WARNING: terminal is not fully functional Quite some people seem to have encountered this problem before and there are some discussion threads on the Web, but I couldn’t find a page that pointed out the direct solution after some googling. Here’s what I did to fix the problem: It turns out that the environment variable TERM is somehow set to dumb instead of the normal cygwin. Apparently the dumb terminal is not as fully functional as cygwin. Here’s what I did to confirm the problem:
1 2 | $ echo $TERM dumb |
I got less working properly again by doing:
1 2 | $ export TERM=cygwin $ less |
It turned out that somehow the $TERM environment variable got set to dumb. To fix that, simply run sysdm.cpl from a Windows command prompt, and delete the environment variable TERM. cygwin will then default TERM to cygwin
good post, it’s helpful
good!
Great! It works fine.
Another solution could be to delete your TERM system variable. For some reason mine was set to “dumb,” causing the same error. (I’m running Windows 7) Hope this helps.
Cool, this annoying issue is now gone.
Thanks for posting the solution!
This solution is worked! Thanks a lot!
You just made my day. Thanks
I’ve been looking for this solution whole day… Thank you very much!
Thank you! That was too easy. Wonder why cygwin’s installer hasn’t changed that.
You saved my day. Thank you very much
@Curmudge0n:
I think cygwin’s installer does it, it changes $TERM to `dumb` somewhere just to perform some operations. Sometimes the installer fails and forgets to set it back to normal again.
It works. Thanks
Man! You saved my day! It’s been about 3 months with a broken terminal here, cursing Windows every single day… now it’s fixed! Like a Holy Grail! Now I’m ready to continue! =)
Heh, looking at the amount of comment this obscure blog received, it’s funny how cygwin would let something like this happen :p
Try using TERM=rxvt. It works well too. (TERM=cygwin works well but vi syntaxes are tossed. rxvt seems to follow them better.)
I was wondering why cygwin was acting strange, this fixed it. Thanks! I wonder if installing both cygwin and mingw was a bad idea.
Thanks man — saved me a lot of headaches today!
thanks man!
Thanks so much!!!!