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Terminal behavior dates back to a time when everybody was just making stuff up because there were no established standards or even conventions. What standards
by jandrese 3y ago
Terminal behavior dates back to a time when everybody was just making stuff up because there were no established standards or even conventions. What standards we have are mostly just whatever the most popular or longest lived company did.
Terminals are in a bad place because there was a whole lot of effort put towards compatibility instead of standardization. The same curse that email suffers under. So the "standards" end up hopelessly complex and also terribly vague because they're trying to support every dumb thing every single company did at the same time. And the worst part is that most all of those companies would cease to exist in short order afterward, so the system is chock full of bug-accurate support for long dead systems that literally nobody uses anymore.
- JdeBP 3y agoWell, yes and no. ECMA-48 is an established standard, and dates from 1976. The standards in use today have been around that long, long enough even that terminals that aren't ECMA-48 compatible are exceedingly rare nowadays. So it's really the reverse of what you state. There has been a lot of effort put into standardization, and compared to the 1960s we are highly uniform in the 21st century and widely adhere to an almost 50-year-old standard. It's not the long-dead systems that spoil this. As evidenced from the headlined article, it is the still active systems adding things like vendor-specific commands for setting titles and clipboards and colours and displaying images and whatnot that have introduced the complexity. A strictly ECMA-48 only emulator doesn't have even half of the problems mentioned in the headlined article, because the control sequences mentioned are extensions to the standard introduced by various GUI terminal emulator programs.