Weird characters when running :shell

Question

When I run the :sh command I see the following characters

If it is relevant, my default shell is zsh and it runs oh-my-zsh also
Thanks

01;32m feels like color codes to me. and those box icons are glyphs not supported by your font. Have you recently changed your configuration? As in moved to a new font/terminal emulator/distro/copied someone's bashrc? — 3N4N, Mar 05 '19 at 12:32
I recently discovered the sh command and Is always been like this. bashrc is made by my, running an empty bashrc results in the same issue — jagjordi, Mar 05 '19 at 12:35

Ralf · Answer 1 · 2019-03-06T06:35:45.220

3

You are doing this in GVim and this only provides a terminal with limited capabilities. The command echo $TERM returns "dumb". Might be your zsh /oh-my-zsh setup can't handle this.

It works for me (with bash) as my bash setups checks for terminal capabilities before configuring a colored PS1 or configuring colored output for ls or grep.

Vim 8.0.1609 added the guioption !, see :help 'go-!'. This provides a better terminal:

:set guioptions+=!

Then the "terminal" started by :sh supports colors.(tested with Vim 8.1.996 on Ubuntu: echo $TERM returns "xterm").

If you have Vim 8.0.747+, or better 8.1.x, you should use :terminal to start a terminal window inside GVim. See :help terminal.

If you are on an older version of Vim, you need to change your zsh setup to work properly on a dumb terminal. Google something like "zsh dumb terminal" or "oh-my-zsh dumb terminal".

edited Mar 06 '19 at 06:35

answered Mar 05 '19 at 12:35

Ralf

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I tried adding ! to guioptions but the problem persists – jagjordi Mar 05 '19 at 23:16
@jagjordi Updated, added some version information. – Ralf Mar 06 '19 at 06:37
@jagjordi try to set shell=/bin/bash and then run shell :sh – Alex Kroll Mar 06 '19 at 06:40
@AlexKroll Do you want to write that in a own answer, or should I integrate it into my answer? – Ralf Mar 06 '19 at 10:20
I am not sure. Your solution solves the issue of getting the wired characters to disappear, but maybe I should post another answer asking how to get zsh to work with :sh – jagjordi Mar 06 '19 at 14:36
@jagjordi If you ask that question, you should probably do that at Unix & Linux. Anyway I would recommend to update to Vim 8.1 and use :terminal. – Ralf Mar 06 '19 at 15:09

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 07 '22 at 09:18

get this behavior when runing from a ssh from other station. It was due to bad interpretation of terminal code. changing the TERM variable solve the issue by limiting vi code used

TERM was set to 'linux' or 'xterm' to work

in my .bashrc and based on parent ssh process

# change terminal value for ssh (avoid weird char escape code in vi)
if [ $( pstree -s $$ | grep -c sshd ) -gt 0 ]
 then
   export TERM='linux'
 fi

Weird characters when running :shell

2 Answers2