21–30 of 191 posts
I could take this a lot more seriously if capital letters were properly used.
Isn't worrying about someone else's grammatical use of capitalization when the piece is understood anyway a little too pedantic?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>punicode was a terrible idea to allow in DNS This is a very western-centric viewpoint. Most of the world does not use the Latin alphabet as its primary writing system.
it is a security centric view point not a "Western" one.
I was working on terminal code recently and had a hell of a time finding anything approaching an authoritative spec or reference docs. The best I found was this: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html I'd recommend that over the wikipedia link in the article, since wikipedia seems to be missing some things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't worrying about someone else's grammatical use of capitalization when the piece is understood anyway a little too pedantic?
I find the text more awkward to read without capital letters starting sentences, especially in paragraph form.
You can't have "everything you wanted to know about terminals" with absolutely no mention of terminfo and (previously) termcap. You don't necessarily need ncurses to have a portable smart terminal experience, but you do need terminfo. ncurses magic relies on the lore stored in terminfo, which contains all of the obscure escape sequences and other information about the disparate world of terminals. They're maintained…
> being compatible only with ANSI-capable terminals is a feature, not a bug
Driving old hardware terminals (as opposed to terminal emulators) is a fun stunt, not something of actual modern value. Every modern terminal emulator supports ANSI escape sequences. Some features are supported by a subset of terminals, but you can either 1) probe for those features by asking the terminal, which some terminals support, or 2) try them and have graceful degradation if they're not supported, or 3) have configuration options to use them, or 4) don't use them.
For every one case in which terminfo allows you to support some obscure non-ANSI terminal, there are many many more cases where terminfo won't happen to have a definition of the user's terminal (or won't know all the capabilities of the user's terminal) and you'll have less functionality than if you just used ANSI escapes. This is especially true over SSH and similar.
I was working on terminal code recently and had a hell of a time finding anything approaching an authoritative spec or reference docs. The best I found was this: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html I'd recommend that over the wikipedia link in the article, since wikipedia seems to be missing some things.
You couldn't find an authoritative spec because there isn't a universal standard. Lots of terminal emulators differ in different ways.
Off-topic, but it would be nice if HN could properly parse the Punycode encoding of internationalized domain names, so rather than the URL appearing as xn--rpa.cc, it appeared properly as ʞ.cc
You can't have "everything you wanted to know about terminals" with absolutely no mention of terminfo and (previously) termcap. You don't necessarily need ncurses to have a portable smart terminal experience, but you do need terminfo. ncurses magic relies on the lore stored in terminfo, which contains all of the obscure escape sequences and other information about the disparate world of terminals. They're maintained…
> being compatible only with ANSI-capable terminals is a feature, not a bug, go the fuck away. terminfo is a fucking joke. nobody needs to target obscure dumb terminals (or smart terminals, for that matter) from 1983 anymore.
I don't have the expertise to opinion on this. But AFAICT most terminals that people still use[1] will self-report as xterm or xterm-256color so they'll only use the xterm escape sequences anyway.
[1] kitty is a notable exception. But it's rarely supported on preinstalled terminfo's, and manually adding them to all the remote servers that you access is a PITA.
I was working on terminal code recently and had a hell of a time finding anything approaching an authoritative spec or reference docs. The best I found was this: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html I'd recommend that over the wikipedia link in the article, since wikipedia seems to be missing some things.
Either way, I wouldn't use it as an authoritative source uncritically.