Hi Philippe, > Adding a single bit of protection in cell attributes to indicate they are > either protected or become transparent (and the rest of the > attributes/character field indicates the id of another terminal grid or > rendering plugin crfeating its own layer and having its own scrolling state > and dimensions) can allow convenient things, including the possibility of > managing a grid-based system of stackable windows. > You can design one of the layer to allow input (managed directly in the > terminal, with local echo without transmission delays and without risks of > overwriting surrounding contents.
At this point you're already touching much more the core of terminal emulator behavior than e.g. my BiDi work does, it's a way more essential, way more complex change – with much less clear goal to me, like, why should emulators implement it, why would applications start using it etc. If you wish to go for this direction, good luck! (If anything, what I do see somewhat feasibile, is building up something from scratch that looks much more like a proportional-font text editing widget, or even a rich text editor, rather than terminal emulator, and figure out step by step how to get a shell and simple utilities and later more complex utilities run in that. This could be a new platform which, by putting decades of hard work in it – which I cannot do voluntarily –, could eventually replace terminal emulators.) Philippe, I hate do say it, but at the risk of being impolite, I just have to. Your ideas would take terminal emulators extremely far from what they are now, with no clear goals and feasibility to me; and are no longer any relevant to BiDi. All I see is we're wasting each other's time on utterly irrelevant topics, and since I see exactly zero chance of any worthful takeaway to come out of this, unfortunately I cannot anymore devote my limited free time for this, I just have to quit this conversation between the two of us. I'm really sorry. best regards, egmont
