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:
$ echo $TERM
dumb
I got less
working properly again by doing:
$ 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