26 Aug
2021
26 Aug
'21
9:17 a.m.
On Aug 26, 2021, at 7:24 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Terminal styling control codes are hit-and-miss even when exclusively using
modern tools. These days, I pretty much exclusively use iTerm2 as my
terminal emulator, which has a bewildering array of compatibility-tweaking
controls to fiddle with, because everything seems to interpret the alleged
standards differently.
When I was relatively new to Linux I just put teminal oddities down to me
not knowing what I was doing and configuring it wrong, but then had the
opportunity to connect a real VT100 to it. "export TERM=vt100" is all
that's
needed, right? There were *loads* of rendering errors, and I got my first
lesson into how well-tested Linux's termcap/terminfo database was.
This is probably why DEC spent a significant amount of effort creating DEC Std 070, the
Video terminal SRM. It's a full formal specification of all the terminal controls,
and everyone was required to conform to that spec.
As is common with DEC standards, it's sufficiently well written that you can simply do
what it says and end up with a interoperable implementation. That's what I did in the
video driver for RSTS on the Pro. (By the way, I like to mention the DDCMP spec as
another example of this "conformance implies interoperability" property; my
experience with that spec was the same.)
Unfortunately, too few specs in the larger world are written to that level of quality.
paul