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Someone should create a database of various terminal emulators and the features they support, so that applications would be able to look up what features are av
by pwdisswordfish2 7y ago
Someone should create a database of various terminal emulators and the features they support, so that applications would be able to look up what features are available.
We shall call it the ‘terminal capabilities library’.
- jchw 7y agoI dislike this strategy because then everyone pretends to be xterm and we’re back to square one.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoYeah, it feels like we're just doing user agent vs feature detection all over again. And the xterm thing is a real concern, since I've read that lots of terminals have indeed pretended to be xterm, leading to programs having to try to detect the real terminal identity because they set TERM=xterm but don't have 100% of xterm's features...
- jchw 7y agoYep... this is exactly the problem. In fact sometimes you are recommended to go and override $TERM in order to fix a bug. Worse, is apps that do “work” but miss features. Like it is often recommended to set your term to xterm-256color to get high color in terminal apps. It’s not a huge deal, but it is simultaneously not a situation I like or think should be encouraged. FWIW I am quite confident you can do better progressive feature detection in terminals, but until that somehow gains traction we’re going to get a lot of “hey, how come i cant click the link?” and the answer is they are using KDE or Windows.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoYup. I use alacritty, but if I SSH I frequently have to force TERM=xterm or something because nothing knows about that. But it's fine when I SSH from in tmux... because I have tmux force TERM=screen-256color to get better color support:)
- markrages 7y ago> We shall call it the ‘terminal capabilities library’. Naw, that's too long, call it something short and snappy like "termcap".