I already reported (some of) the symptoms in bug #26750 (which accidentally was identified as a dupe of some other, unrelated bug), but just found out the real problem: rxvt sets TERM="xterm"! Because rxvt is completely different from xterm in may aspects, this prevents HOME and END keys from working, as well as restoring the primary screen in progs that use the alternate screen. The correct value for TERM is "rxvt"!
Hum, I understand what you mean. It's okay to set TERM=rxvt by default, but it may break rxvt on monochrome display (you can still use rxvt with TERM=rxvt-basic). I guess nobody uses monochrome display on Gentoo (though I am using monochrome X on NetBSD ;-p) but still it would be nice to display a notice after emerge. Can you think of good message for that? It's a matter of English lessons for me ;-)
All right, I make default TERM variable configurable and set it to "rxvt" instead of "xterm" by default. If you still have any problem around it, please reopen this bug.
ah, bugzilla email still broken! (sorry, I never saw any responses to this page) If the only difference between rxvt-basic and rxvt is colors, wouldn't it be better to use rxvt-basic by default and override that with rxvt from a color app-defaults file? (sorry bartron for stealing your idea, but you said I could) (that means AFTER bug #25705 and bug #26354 are closed; unfortunately they're low-priority to the xfree team because they don't cause any crashes. You may want to poke the one non-dev commenter in those bugs a bit more; 1. he seems to know a lot more than he says; and 2. people seem to listen to what he says; and 3. he seems to have the ability to find a solution for everything in less than 5 minutes. He promised to write a comment here when bug #26354 and bug #25705 are closed; unfortunately all he has to say now is for me to be more patient)
no, rxvt-basic shouldn't be default because it causes problem when you ssh to other boxes, say FreeBSD or Red Hat (Not only dialog based program is affected but also fundamental control key sequences such as ^H are broken). They all have a terminfo/termcap entry for rxvt-basic, so I need to investigate the differenct between their entries and Gentoo's one.
