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I'm trying to access my raspberry pi via its serial console on the gpio pins. It's working fine through a USB-3.3v serial dongle. However, there's a problem with long lines and long screens not displaying correctly. I'm running minicom in a gnome-terminal which is not set to 24x80 columns (and gnome-terminal's Terminal/1 (24x80) option) doesn't help.

It's as if minicom completely ignores the sigwinch it must be getting, and/or has no way to send that over the serial line to change the terminal type.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Russell Nelson
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  • Not a valid/answer or solution, but I find putty works quite well as a serial terminal in linux. – jordanm Jan 24 '13 at 01:58
  • Sure, but it's still stuck in GTK+ 1.x. – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jan 24 '13 at 02:02
  • There are [other minicom alternatives](http://ec2-54-246-66-171.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/) possibly worth trying (the thread mentions `cu`, `screen`, `seyon`, `conserver` and `kermit`) – sr_ Jan 24 '13 at 07:47
  • I did some experimenting with xterm vs gnome-terminal, and screen vs minicom. None of them change it. I'm concluding that the problem is on the Debian end, where it's not emitting the correct terminal escape codes. – Russell Nelson Mar 27 '13 at 16:32
  • May be a solution here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/106644/how-to-change-the-width-of-remote-serial-console –  Mar 25 '16 at 13:38

1 Answers1

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You're right, in that minicom won't communicate the fact of a window change to the far end. If you're using a VT100-like emulation, you might be able to do a

eval `resize`

to generate some control characters that will force the emulator to tell the far end the size of its window.

On Debian-like systems, resize is in the xterm package.

Flup
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    At least with zsh and bash it's sufficient to call `resize` as-is. I don't need to eval its output and the shell correctly adjusts the LINES/COLUMNS variables on its own. – maxschlepzig Mar 07 '18 at 14:58