>> What about terminals - and emulators - that don't do X3.64? > I haven't found one that doesn't do X3.64 yet, except ancient > outdated ones that toybox probably shouldn't care about for the same > reason it doesn't care about EBCDIC or the 'mt' command.
Ah. >> ESC does nothing for me, so \e[3J would display as [3J. > Do you edit text in your terminal? If so what editor do you use, I'm > interested since I haven't found a vi implementation that doesn't use > ANSI escape codes, nor any CLI editor that isn't ed. First, the easy one to dispose of: I use ed only very occasionally, mostly for automated tasks. Depending on the task, I use vi or I use emacs. (These days, "emacs" seems to mean "GNU emacs" to most people. I do not use GNU emacs. I use a different emacs variant.) I have yet to find a vi variant that doesn't work just fine when presented with a suitable $TERM (and $TERMCAP, on systems that don't come with a description of my terminal type, which in my experience most do). Admittedly, I haven't actively looked for such a variant. Even vim works, as well as vim ever works - which, for me, isn't very well; my brushes with vim have mostly been concerned with shutting off its "improvements", until I learned that most systems where I find vim also have or can get nvi, which is much closer to what my fingers and eyes expect from vi. Yes, vi works fine with X3.64, when presented with a $TERM that tells it that's what the terminal expects. The whole point of $TERM (and termcap/terminfo) is for programs to adjust themselves to the terminal, after all, and, except for a recent spate of programs that insist on throwing X3.64 at me even when $TERM gives them no reason to think it will work (that becomes _really_ obvious, when ESC does nothing!), it's done its job excellently. (I even, recently, ran into one thing so obnoxious as to outright hang on startup because it didn't get a response to some X3.64 sequence I forget the name of.) >> Or do you simply not care about portability to that extent? > No not really, Ah. > The vast majority of terminals from probably at least the last 25 > years have ANSI escape code (X3.64) support. So, the last 25 years are all that matters to you? > They are bad to use unnecessarily. But clearing the screen and > scrollback buffer requires them. No, it does not. Clearing the screen - when supported! - and the scrollback buffer - when supported! - do not necessarily use X3.64; they use terminal-dependent sequences, which may or may not be a single sequence for both functions and may or may not be an X3.64 sequence. Also, I don't recall seeing anything in X3.41 or X3.64 for scrollback manipulation; as far as I can recall, it doesn't mention anything like scrollback. The closest I find in my notes with a few quick greps are CSI ... U and CSI ... V, which aren't a very good fit to most scrollback implementations I've seen. > Terminal manipulation is what X3.64 codes are _for_ Indeed. And communication is what German is for. But I, at least, don't expect everyone to speak German, nor any other single language. Nor do I expect all terminals to speak any single control/escape sequence language. > Maybe you should just put "alias clear="yes '' | head -n $LINES"" in > a rc file if clearing the screen without ANSI codes matters to you. No. I put the correct terminal type in $TERM and, in my experience, clear(1) Just Works - though admittedly I haven't tried toybox's - because it _does_ understand what $TERM is for. > although that method puts the prompt at the bottom of the screen and > doesn't clear the scrollback buffer, it's the best you can achieve > without checking the terminfo database and using strange escape code > protocols that stopped being relevant decades ago or just using the > ANSI codes that 99% of modern terminals support anyway. I...see. I believe there is no point in continuing this conversation. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ Toybox mailing list Toybox@lists.landley.net http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net
