vt/ansi codes

[abc at ai1.anchorage.mtaonline.net]

i am just trying to understand. there are things i don't like, and want to do
better.  i don't know where else to learn, i do search and read and study
whatever i can.  i do read with intent to learn.  it appears to come down to
an argument of:

support everything ever made in the world
or otherwise do-able regardless of
efficiency and complexity

vs. 

support 95+% of possibilities with a
95% reduction in overhead and inefficiency.

i have no interest in arguing, only understanding.
i think i got an "itch" cuz after 25 years of seeing
the same old procedures when technology is not comparable
in any way 25 years later - well - heh - things need to evolve
or die.  and i do not see good argument in opposition to
evolution of code.  and i agree it may be out of ignorance.
but not lazy ignorance.  just ignorance of insufficient facts.

> > 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.

what are the facts?  where are the facts?  who has these terminal usage
statistics?  there appear to be no facts.  i can't find any.  and none are put
forth.  just because something "exists" doesn't mean it's relevant to
anything.  and just because "there exist" some terminals that don't understand
the full ANSI escape standard doesn't mean that the full ANSI escape standard
shouldn't be implimented in BSD terminal drivers.  as i see it, there is one
MAJOR flaw, and that is LEFT/RIGHT scrolling.  without the proper ANSI escape
sequence, L/R scrolling in color is doomed to be 100x more ineffecient, which
is a disaster for text editing across serial lines.  i have not heard any way
termcap/curses can work around this deficiency.  scroll regions would be nice
as well for applications requiring status lines.  i haven't heard a single
reason why these simple things are not part of BSD terminal drivers.
if i knew enough about integrating things with the kernel, i'd write
new terminal related drivers myself.

> 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.

there exist many things.
 
> 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.