Unknown terminal type
2. The solution
Emiel Kollof
May 21, 2026 11:01:55
termcap, unix, terminal, curses
1. The problem
If you mess around with shiney new software, like newfangled terminals of the likes of kitty(1) or ghostty(1) , you might sometimes see this:
xterm-kitty: unknown terminal type
Which means hat TUI-applications will promptly give you the middle finger because they have no clue about what your terminal can do. Then begins the song and dance of infocmp(1) and tic(1) to get the terminfo stuff installed into your sessions so at least things like vi(1) will work.
2. The solution
Of course, a website. :)
I’ve created this to have a one-liner I can paste into my terminal when I ever encounter that dreaded error message. There is already quite a list of termcaps on the page, and I invite everyone to make this more complete.
The script to install the termcaps should be safe, it won’t execute as root, and it has quite strict checksum checks built in, so changing it in flight is very difficult. Of course you don’t have to pipe it through sh(1) , it will work just fine when you download it, check the SHA256 checksum yourself and inspect the script. Whatever floats your boat.
Please enjoy and I hope this service helps you out in some way, and maybe you can help yourself as well by contributing!
Take care,
Andrath