On Mon, 2021-04-05 at 20:30 +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Hi, > > Martijn van Duren wrote on Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 09:30:36AM +0200: > > So going by this phrase the character should not be printed > > When formatting a document, for example for printing on paper or > the online equivalent like PostScript or PDF, i agree. But i > strongly prefer the terminal to always display this character because > the terminal's usual purpose is not nice text formatting for visual > consumption. It should usually show the full content of strings > or files, be it for inspection or for editing. Omitting characters > in such contexts sets nasty traps for the person working with the > terminal. > > So i say nothing should be changed at all in OpenBSD. > > Yes, that means column counting is wrong on the terminal, but that's > a very minor problem, if it's a problem at all, compared to the havoc > that could result from not showing the character on the terminal at > all, and it cannot be fixed without causing worse problems in situations > that matter more.
I disagree with you here. As sthen@ just pointed out this is most likely a legacy print from ISO-8559-1 which uses a different definition of SHY. Saying that not showing a character on the terminal at all can cause havoc also have different implications: we would have to start printing ZWSP and have to make a stronger distinction between tab and space. And that´s just a few examples top of the head. If you want to see the actual text you´re working with you need something like vis(1), hexdump(1), or something more sophisticated for UTF-8. We claim we support UTF-8, so we should use the unicode consortium definitions. Especially if they make linguistic sense; which it does. > > The bug in NetBSD and Linux should be fixed, but that's off-topic here. And I´d like to add terminals in unicode mode to that list. > > Yours, > Ingo martijn@
