vt/ansi codes

[Chuck Swiger]

abc at ai1.anchorage.mtaonline.net wrote:
[ ... ]
> Terminal driver design is certainly a stupid part of Unix. Back when this was
> written there certainly was a serious mess of terminals which would actually
> fail non-gracefully on output designed for other terminals.
> 
> But this is not true today. Today EVERY SINGLE TERMINAL IN THE WORLD
> understands ANSI escape sequences at full speed and will not choke (and will
> likely display) on all ISO-8859-1 characters.

Shall we count the ways that this is wrong?

1) There exist terminals in the world which do not understand ANSI escape sequences.

2) There exist terminals that do not work at arbitrarily high wire speeds, and 
thus operate at low baud and/or require delays and padding for certain operations.

3) Most terminals display either the high-bit "VT100 character graphics", the 
IBM 437 codepage (aka "MS-DOS character graphics"), or nothing at all.  I can't 
point to any physical device-- not one-- that I have which displays the accented 
characters from ISO-8859 by default.

> It is time to scrap every single option in the editing portion of the
> terminal driver.  And start accepting *both* ^H and ^? as backspace. 

The first suggestion requires a replacement that one would scrap the "editing 
portions of the terminal driver" with.  Nobody has come up with a better 
replacement yet.

^H is "backspace", ASCII "bs".  ^? is ASCII "del".  Some people expect them to 
work alike; others seem to want one to delete backwards and one to delete 
forwards.  It would be nice if people agreed on this matter, in the same way 
that it would be nice if people stopped killing each other in the name of fun 
and religion...

> I would agree that in this area, morbid fear of being incompatable is
> completely freezing development. Sometimes advancement is achieved by DELETING
> code, not just by adding it.

...but I don't conflate the relative importance of a dispute about arcane 
aspects of computing and, say, the conflict in the Middle East.  "Morbid fear" 
is pretty strong language and is perhaps appropriate when discussing the latter 
issue, but likely not appropriate with regard to the former issue.

-- 
-Chuck

PS: No, I don't want to discuss politics: it's off-topic.