Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals

Her 'interesting, unique' 'typography and punctuation' makes me want to poke my eyes out instead of focusing on the content itself. You sneer at conventions, but they were developed after centuries of typesetting and typewriting.

Her entire style sheet is an abomination:

- The serif typeface she has used, EB Garamond, is best used for printed text. I am working on a 27" 1080p monitor, and the low DPI makes for very painful reading. Sans-serif humanist typefaces like Verdana (used at Hacker News, thank goodness) or Open Sans are best.

Better still, use the OS typeface in `font-family` (`-apple-system`, Segoe UI, SF Pro, Roboto, Lucida, Ubuntu, Open Sans, etc) instead of dragging in your own. If one so desperately wants a serif typeface, please use something that's nice and blocky, like Droid Serif or IBM Plex Serif.

Incidentally, I have the same qualms with the default typeface in LaTeX: the Computer Modern provided is far too spindly for digital reading. There is an alternative, MLModern[0] that is thicker, but it only has Type 1 glyphs rather than OpenType.

- The colours she has chosen are not as bad, but they are certainly distracting. Can't go wrong with a monochrome dark grey/white, or even straightforward black on white.

- Uppercase/lowercase letters and proper punctuation help break up the prose, and improve the reading experience by differentiating proper nouns, beginnings of sentences, etc etc. Dismissing this by saying 'Oooh, look at me, I'm different for different's sake' is just exasperating.

Incidentally, I'm probably of a similar age group as the writer, but I like to follow grammatical and typographical rules in long prose (I don't care as much in personal texts), because they make sense.

[0]: https://ctan.org/pkg/mlmodern?lang=en

So long as you're only concerned with placing and formatting characters on the screen, support for the subset of "extended VT100" which is required is essentially universal. There is no disagreement over what escape sequences can be used to move the cursor, for example, or to clear the screen. Using an abstraction layer like termcap is effectively a no-op here; it will output the exact same sequences for any modern terminal application.

And if you want to support modern and/or esoteric features like embedded graphics or custom characters ("sixels"), you're probably going to handcraft that anyway, as support for those features is very limited, and most abstraction libraries won't support them at all. So I'm not sure I see the case for an abstraction at either end of the spectrum.

Sorry if I misunderstood your question!

However, for inputs the situation is essentially similar: the standards again depend on the terminal, and there can be multiple interpretation than can be conflicting.

Take for example Control-H and Control-? : which is delete and which is backspace depend on the terminal you use!

> I’ve searched several times for such standards before but never had any luck…

There are sources, mostly Thomas E. Dickey (of xterm fame) but personally, I try to take an emulator and make it behave to what my fingers are doing with the minimum level of configuration.

To follow up on Control-H and Control-?, here's what my .inputrc does:

### Delete to the right will be remapped to Delete

"\e[3~": delete-char

# keypad on .

#"\eOn": delete-char

# Special case for VT100 (borks backspace -> make it conditional)

$if term=vt100

"\C-?": delete-char

$endif

### Delete to left will be remapped to Backspace

"\C-?": backward-delete-char

# keypad on 5

#"\eOu": backward-delete-char

# Special case for VT100 (borks backspace -> make it conditional)

$if term=vt100

"\C-H" : backward-delete-char

$endif

(yes, the numpad delete has its own case!)

Here's another one, for Control-Backspace and Control-Delete

### Line cuts will Ctrl-Backspace and Ctrl-Delete

"\C-_": backward-kill-line

"\e[3;5~": kill-line

# Ctrl-Delete variants for tmux and urxvt

"\e[M": kill-line

"\e[3^": kill-line

And last time I checked, Windows terminal needed proper remaps cf https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal/issues/755 like { "keys": "ctrl+backspace", "command": { "action": "sendInput", "input": "\u0017" },

This would piggyback on "\C-h" backward-kill-word - which might be incompatible as it's got a different meaning for VT-100 as noted above.

Quoting you again:

> I’ve searched several times for such standards before but never had any luck…

You shouldn't bother too much about that: terminals are just tools to help you do your work, and while sometimes you can use a lot of pre-existing configurations or documentation to have as much compatibility among the various standards as possible, there are other times when you need to break the standards that stand in your way.

For example, I'm a Windows fan, so I believe Ctrl-C should be copy, Ctrl-V paste, and I don't really care about the traditional unixisms that would cause me try to learn to use Shift-Control-C for copy and Shift-Control-V for paste (just... no!!!)

You may disagree with that, so let's take a more staightfoward example: I care even less of the more obscure unixisms like Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q that I rarely need. Who needs to "freeze" the tty output in 2022?

So in that case, I've remapped Ctrl-S to "kill word forward", something usually done with Esc-d by default.

To achieve that, in my .bashrc I first clear the defaults with stty:

## Remap ctrl-c to ctrl-x to copy/paste with ctrl-c and ctrl-v, and disable ctrl-s/ctrl-q

stty intr ^X stop undef start undef rprnt undef discard undef swtch undef -ixoff -ixon

# The above doesn't show ^S,^Q,^R and ^O anymore in stty -a

Then I can do the remappings in my .inputrc:

### Backward-kill-word is ctrl-w, while kill-word is alt|esc-d,

# so instead, map ctrl-s which makes ctrl-k|u and ctrl-w|s very close

"\C-s": kill-word

All that to say, standards can be helpful, but there's nothing set in stone: with Control-H and Control-? already causing such headaches (but following all the standards) I don't feel so bad for abusing the standards with my use of Control-S for forward kill word, as it complements nicely the existing Control-K, Control-U and Control-W (all the 3 of which are standard BTW!)