Hi Nicholas, Nicholas Marriott wrote on Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 04:21:15PM +0000:
> I don't know why it is off in xterm but oxtabs is the default in > ttydefaults.h and appears to on for mostly everything else, > including ssh and tmux (which just uses what forkpty gives it). That means that even without using any userland utility program, in ssh, tmux, and mostly everything else except xterm, simple stuff like $ printf "o\to\n\xc3\xb3\to\n" just ain't gonna work by default, printing only six instead of the required seven blanks in the second line, and if i understand correctly, short of hacking into some scary terminal code, that can't be improved. I don't think working around that problem in random userland programs by essentially deprecating the tab character on the output side is a good idea - in particular in view of Theo's comment that column(1) may be used in scripts that may expect to see some tabs. At the very least, i think proposals to pull expand(1) into programs should be kept seperate from implementing UTF-8 support, unless expand(1)-like functionality is already specified in the documentation of the utility and/or functionally unavoidable, like in colrm(1). Yours, Ingo
