I’m using xterm in 256-color mode since a month. And I noticed that whenever I log in to any of the remote boxen (via ssh) from my xterm, I started getting WARNING: terminal is not fully functional, whenever I use less, screen, etc. curses applications. So this means xterm-256color
(xterm in 256 color) terminfo is not available in the remote box. Now in most of the remote boxen, I don’t have superuser access, which means I can’t install this terminfo systemwide. So after going through terminfo(5) I figured out that I need to install this terminfo in my $HOME
(at remote end) to get desired functionality. For that I did:
% ssh server mkdir -p .terminfo/x
% scp /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-256color server:.terminfo/x/
Thats it. Now I don’t get that warning anymore and I can use Emacs/vim in 256-colors :) . What more do you want from 256-colors life…:)