On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 11:20:39AM -0500, Greg Stark wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Jan 2023 at 00:07, Pavel Stehule <pavel.steh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I partially watch an progres in VTE - one of the widely used terminal libs,
> > and I am very sceptical so there will be support in the next two years.
> >
> > Maybe the new microsoft terminal will give this area a new dynamic, but
> > currently only few people on the planet are working on fixing or enhancing
> > terminal's technologies. Unfortunately there is too much historical balast.
>
> Fwiw this isn't really about terminal emulators. psql is also used to
> generate text files for reports or for display in various ways.
>
> I think it's worth using whatever APIs we have available to implement
> better alignment for grapheme clusters and just assume whatever will
> eventually be used to display the output will display it "properly".
>
> I do not think it's worth trying to implement this ourselves if the
> libraries aren't there yet. And I don't think it's worth trying to
> adapt to the current state of the current terminal. We don't know that
> that's the only place the output will be viewed and it'll all be
> wasted effort when the terminals eventually implement full support.
Well, as one of the URLs I quoted said:
This is by design. wcwidth() is utterly broken. Any terminal or
terminal application that uses it is also utterly broken. Forget
about emoji wcwidth() doesn't even work with combining characters,
zero width joiners, flags, and a whole bunch of other things.
So, either we have to find a function in the library that will do the
looping over the string for us, or we need to identify the special
Unicode characters that create grapheme clusters and handle them in our
code.
--
Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com
Embrace your flaws. They make you human, rather than perfect,
which you will never be.
