On 18/01/2026 09:32, Egmont Koblinger wrote:
Anyways, one more thing I'm curious about. Should HELP_NO_SGR be named
to something a bit more friendly? I did not know what SGR meant until I
looked it up.
I assume it might have been influenced by groff's GROFF_NO_SGR, but I
agree that it's way too technical and not that user friendly.
It's also not only SGR.
SGR (Select Graphic Rendition) is the family of escape sequences that
modify per-cell rendering properties, such as colors, bold, italic,
underlined etc.
OSC (Operating System Command) is another family, controlling
OS-related stuff such as the window title, or the concept of the
working directory in order to open a new terminal in the same dir.
Hyperlinks is a bit weird hybrid. It's the first OSC controlling a
per-cell property and not a global one. SGR could have perhaps been a
better choice in the sense that it's per-cell, although hyperlinks are
not about graphical rendition but an OS-related functionality. So
there's pros and cons for either choice. OSC was chosen purely for
syntax reasons: SGR's syntax doesn't allow URLs to be included (or it
would be extremely cumbersome, like encoding each byte in decimal).
GROFF_NO_SGR has a reason to defend the use of the word "SGR" where in
fact it stands for both SGR and OSC 8: This env var has existed
many-many years before OSC 8 support was added, or even OSC 8 itself
was invented.
For a new utility where it turns off both SGR (bold typeface) and OSC
(hyperlinking functionality), I think coming up with a brand new,
user-friendly name would be a better choice than following groff's
example.
I don't see this variable being used,
mainly for internal tests, and only for edge cases externally,
so I wasn't too worried about the name.
I _was_ aligning with groff's GROFF_NO_SGR but am happy to adjust.
I'll use HELP_NO_MARKUP.
cheers,
Padraig
