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Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

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Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#41

Post by ablekh »

boneitis wrote: post #39
ablekh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you and I are talking about different "readabilities". Yours implies a capability to effectively convey conceptual meaning, whereas mine (in this context) implies UX-focused - that is, purely visual - readability of the text at hand. I hope that this clarifies the source of our presumably different opinions.

I had considered both, as I think they considerably overlap (e: in this case, at least). In fact, if you want to want to completely isolate the two, I had mainly considered the UX-focused and visual aspect. Contending over the ultimate conveyance of meaning in and of itself would have had me arguing for what we both already agree on. Come onnnnn. It's not that bad with the grammar/punctuation, capitalization of acron…

If you are OK with a text being not that bad, hmm ... it is your choice. Readability is an extremely important UX concept, not to mention the accessibility in this case. For the current version of the text, people with less than great eyesight have to rely only on the (tiny) trailing dot to visually distinguish between sentences. Having proper capitalization within the context would enormously improve the text's accessibility.

As for "grammar/punctuation, capitalization of acronyms and proper nouns, backtick highlights, and codeblocks", well ... if the text would lack that, it would have been a completely unreadable wall of text.

Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#42

Post by boneitis »

ablekh wrote: post #41
boneitis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had considered both, as I think they considerably overlap (e: in this case, at least). In fact, if you want to want to completely isolate the two, I had mainly considered the UX-focused and visual aspect. Contending over the ultimate conveyance of meaning in and of itself would have had me arguing for what we both already agree on. Come onnnnn. It's not that bad with the grammar/punctuation, capitalization of acron…

If you are OK with a text being not that bad, hmm ... it is your choice. Readability is an extremely important UX concept, not to mention the accessibility in this case. For the current version of the text, people with less than great eyesight have to rely only on the (tiny) trailing dot to visually distinguish between sentences. Having proper capitalization within the context would enormously improve the text's acce…

I'm speaking of the readability being not that bad.

Accessibility arguments you're pushing here and elsewhere should have been brought up much earlier. I'm responding mainly to the "ridiculous!" outburst. (e: OK, no exclamation, and a more charitable reading will have me withdraw "outburst.")

> if the text would lack that, it would have been a completely unreadable wall of text.

Yet, in its form, it is more readable and coherent than most of what gets pushed out these days, even with proper capitalization. If anything, that is ridiculous.

With this shifting, I would like to take my leave. Be well, and good night.

Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#43

Post by akira2501 »

titzer wrote: post #23

Oh man, they left out the part I was hoping to find out more about! > it's good form to have a function called resize() or similar that you run on program start and later when the terminal window is resized. while there is a horrible way to do this with ANSI escapes, it's better to just bite the bullet and learn how to use ioctls and termios. I wanted to know about the horrible ANSI escape sequences to send that can…

Horrible escape sequences: man 4 console_codes

Horrible console ioctls: man 4 console_ioctl

Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#44

Post by ximm »

I recently rewrote my fork of cplay and got fed up with curses. Boy do I wish I had found this article earlier because it describes everything I painfully had to cobble together. This is great!

Just one nit: Doing stuff in a signal handler is usually a bad idea because it can interrupt your code at any time. The usual work around is a trick called "self-pipe". https://ldpreload.com/blog/signalfd-is-useless

For anyone interested, I created a library in the process: https://github.com/xi/boon (It takes some inspiration from react but bare with me, I think it actually makes sense.)

Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#45

Post by sime2009 »

theamk wrote: post #7

That’s pretty nasty - this article is factually incorrect in probably the worst way: the code will work on author’s computer, but not for other people [0] Not to mention that it is missing “good citizen” features like turning off colors when stdout is not a tty. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18125374

> Not to mention that it is missing “good citizen” features like turning off colors when stdout is not a tty.

It's a tutorial, not a 1000 page book. Some things won't be in there.

Besides, detecting stdout or tty isn't even relevant for interactive TUI applications.

Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#46

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

ablekh wrote: post #10

The lack of attention to (or, rather, the complete disregard of) proper capitalization is ridiculous. This is the second post I'm seeing in two days that feature this "style". Quite a disturbing trend, if you ask me.

ever heard of konsequente kleinschreibung?

Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#47

Post by jjoonathan »

brian_cloutier wrote: post #36
jjoonathan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world where everyone has terrible body odor, your nose will become used to it and it will no longer be a distracting shock.

This analogy doesn't hold. You were born with a sensitivity for body odor, you were not born with any sensitivity for lowercase letters. Do you really mean to imply that sentences which start with lowercase letters are intrinsically visually offensive?

Every time I've given the benefit of the doubt to someone who opens our interaction by intentionally burning social capital on something frivolous, it has been a mistake.

Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#49

Post by ablekh »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #46
ablekh wrote: post #10

The lack of attention to (or, rather, the complete disregard of) proper capitalization is ridiculous. This is the second post I'm seeing in two days that feature this "style". Quite a disturbing trend, if you ask me.

ever heard of konsequente kleinschreibung ?

Never heard about it before seeing your comment. However, I have just looked it up and I think that the very limited scope (both temporal and geographical) of this "movement" just additionally emphasizes and supports the points that I have made in this thread.

Re: Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals (2018)

#50

Post by Chris2048 »

What's this stuff about:

> also, i'm a) a nobody and b) a woman. nothing i wrote would ever gain any traction; any project designed to supplant ncurses needs to come from someone who's actually known to the FOSS community. and a maintainer who isn't a cripple.

Did ncurses gain popularity because of the identity of its maintainer(s)?! I was of the impression that it's whoever gets there first.

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