notcurses-info hangs from VSCode and Windows terminals when running over SSH

[xaviershay]

I have built notcurses on a remote debian machine. notcurses-info (and indeed, all notcurses- binaries) appear to hang when launched. It seems very likely that TERM and the like aren't set up properly ... but given it doesn't work on multiple different emulators even after setting recommend settings, it feels like at least a bug in documentation. I also feel that hanging is bad and it should probably exit?

Environments

MS Terminal (Windows)

• export | egrep 'LANG|LC_CTYPE|TERM'

I tried both the default:

$ export | egrep 'LANG|LC_CTYPE|TERM'
declare -x LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
declare -x LANGUAGE="en_AU:en"
declare -x TERM="xterm-256color"

and also those recommended in TERMINALS.md

$ export | egrep 'LANG|LC_CTYPE|TERM'
declare -x COLORTERM="24bit"
declare -x LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
declare -x LANGUAGE="en_AU:en"
declare -x TERM="ms-terminal"

both exhibited the same behaviour

• notcurses version (available from notcurses-demo i) notcurses-demo hangs, but I compiled from source:

Verbose output is here

$ git branch
* (HEAD detached at v3.0.16)
$ uname -a
Linux apollo 6.1.0-38-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.147-1 (2025-08-02) x86_64 GNU/Linux

• terminal name + version

Microsoft Terminal 1.22.12111.0

VSCode Terminal (Windows)

$ export | egrep 'LANG|LC_CTYPE|TERM'
declare -x COLORTERM="truecolor"
declare -x LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
declare -x LANGUAGE="en_AU:en"
declare -x TERM="xterm-256color"
declare -x TERM_PROGRAM="vscode"
declare -x TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION="1.104.1"

Version: 1.104.1 (system setup)
Commit: 0f0d87fa9e96c856c5212fc86db137ac0d783365
Date: 2025-09-17T23:36:24.973Z
Electron: 37.3.1
ElectronBuildId: 12404162
Chromium: 138.0.7204.235
Node.js: 22.18.0
V8: 13.8.258.31-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

Alacritty (Windows)

Did not work by default, but got at least some results after setting recommended settings

VSCode (Mac)

As above VSCode, same behaviour.

iTerm2 (Mac)

It works!!!!

(Though terminal is left corrupted after exiting notcurses-demo by pressing q)

Potentially related issues

• https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/2689 is pretty light on, but matches the behaviour I observe.
• https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/2363 is a hang, but more likely related to windows build behaviour?
• https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/2644 another hang, also perhaps more likely related to windows build behaviour?

[mdiiorio]

I support a tool that uses Notcurses and I've heard from users that they're seeing hangs after upgrading to the new Mac OS, Tahoe. I wonder if it's a similar issue? I'm going to try to repro once I get access to a machine with Tahoe.