Paul Evans

Looks cool! Random note: the best way to support keystrokes such as Ctrl-Enter and Shift-Enter in the terminal is CSI-u mode: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/ It's supported by most terminals by now.

Notcurses is ok, not great. Tickit[1] is much nicer, and comes with what is possibly the only good way of reading modifier characters from a terminal (seriously). Alternately, if you're ok with not running in a terminal, check out bearlibterminal[2]. 1: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtickit/ 2: http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal

Yay! This is cool. I wrote something like this myself a while back: http://41j.com/hterm/ I recommend checking out libvterm (http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libvterm/). It abstracts out of lot of the v220/xterm terminal rendering code and is very neat. I'd love to see it get more support. Also nice to see Sixel support (graphical terminal are fun!).

For that matter: how does it compare to libvterm (https://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libvterm/)?

Calling it libTerminal might be confusing. There are other terminal emulation libraries—for example libvterm[1], notably used to power the embedded terminal in Neovim.[2] [1] https://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libvterm/ [2] https://neovim.io/doc/user/terminal.html

Every time I see this I'm hoping that it has taken off, because it feels like such an obvious improvement. Instead of that we have some support for it in FreeBSD, and a homegrown solution in some packages like util-linux. Yeah, there are some concerns but the concept seems sound and the implementation can be iterated upon. For instance, years later and it still isn't packaged in Debian. If nothing out of the tens of thousands of Debian packages has a dependency on it there presumably must be a good reason. It strikes me as one of those libtermkey¹/libvterm things where Leonerd pushed it for years before anybody really used it, despite it being a seemingly obvious improvement over the status quo. ¹ https://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtermkey/

It is briefly mentioned in this post, but this work is based on a proposal by Paul Evans [1] (creator of libtickit and libvterm, among others). Kovid deserves credit for addressing some of the issues in the original proposal, and for documenting it well. But Evans deserves credit as well for formulating the original idea. Note also that this is not the only solution to this problem. Xterm has had its own solution for a long time called modifyOtherKeys [2] which has been supported by Vim and iTerm2 for quite some time (I believe foot supports it as well, perhaps others). Of course people have different opinions on which approach is “better”, though empirically it seems like the CSIu/“fixterms”/kitty approach has a lot more momentum at present. [1]: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/ [2]: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/modified-keys.html

Same mechanism that we could use to disambiguate keys like ^H and backspace. http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/

Question: How does this differ from Paul Evans's solution in libtickit, as discussed here[0]? (Yeah, yeah, I can read the whole thing and see for myself, but I'm hoping someone has a quick answer.) [0] http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/

Here's a proposal to fix #2 and #3: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/

Notcurses is nice, but I believe that tickit[1] is the most mature and exciting option out there. By the author of libtermkey, which was (and is?) the only library to properly read keys from a tty. 1: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtickit/

IMO the biggest problem with terminals is poor input handling. Many useful key combinations are impossible to type. Paul Evans has a proposal for fixing this, but it seems to be mostly ignored: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/

> In principle, your terminal could also turn Ctrl-Shift-I into some special escape sequence which an application could parse. Such a sequence just doesn't exist in the terminal protocol you are using, that is all. A specification that allows all key combinations to be recognized by terminal applications does indeed exist: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/ Sadly, very few apps use it. Vim for example doesn't, but maybe there is hope that NeoVim will: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/176

Yeah, C is really missing a way to serialize/deserialize data from raw memory/sockets into structs usable by your code. The least insane way, libpack [1] requires replicating the data format definition three times: * define the struct with all elements * define a string for the binary representation * call fpack/funpack with the string and all the struct elements as parameters... Unfortunately, fixing this either requires some kind of black X-macro [2] magic or another template language used to write the specification and to generate the three above-mentioned representations from it... [1] http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libpack/intro.html [2] http://drdobbs.com/184401387

Relevant: https://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/

I did look at nix, but was less than enthusiastic about how complex[1] the software is. If I could, I would probably prefer gnu guix - but AFAIK it is unlikely to ever support running on macos - and is similarly complex (build daemon needed to run in background). I'm also sad that pkgsrc seems to be abandoned wrt binary builds for macos - I could at least not find correct gpg keys for verifying the archives listed at: https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-macos/ Perhaps it's workable as a build-from-source package manager. For now, it seems that macports have most of what I need - with less complexity than nix, and a better handling of upgrades than brew. Does appear that brew moves faster, eg: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/65922 (i briefly tried a local build, but ran into dependency problems with libvterm that I didn't manage to resolve - there's a 0.3 [2] tarball, but the build system for neovim wasn't happy and kept finding 0.1.4 after it was uninstalled in favour of 0.3). [1] https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/installation/installing-binary.htm… [2] https://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libvterm/

Checkout libtickit http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libtickit/

> I wish there were, in C, some equivalent of "struct" but where you could specify I don't think there's a need for a struct-equivalent, I think there's a need for a struct loader with these capabilities, it would only be in charge of packing and unpacking but would shove everything in a struct. Basically, Erlang's bit syntax for C (thought the bit syntax unpack to locals, not structs): << Foo:16/little, Bar:12/signed, Baz:4 >> = Bin. (default type specifications are integer, unsigned and big-endian, between the : and / is the size of the data in "units", where Unit defaults to 8 bits for the binary type and 1 bit for integers, floats and strings). Doesn't natively do alignment though, the developer has to pad on his own. Python's `struct` module is similar[0]: http://docs.python.org/library/struct.html although the format string is basically unreadable and I believe it's absolutely terrible at decoding non-standard sizes (e.g. an int stored on 3 bits) [0] libpack[1] for C, Perl also has this[2] which was probably the inspiration for Python [1] http://www.leonerd.org.uk/code/libpack/intro.html [2] http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/unpack.html