Hi Elias, > For all the willingness to come up with ways to modernise the terminal, > you've only spoken about trying to showhorn rtl text in to the vt102 basic > terminal.
Yes, addressing BiDi was the exact thing that I did now. What's wrong with that? I can't address all the imperfectnesses at once. If you take a look at VTE's changelog, you'll see that I've done a lot more than this, and chances are this won't be my last improvement either. > What I mean is that f you're willing to go as far as introducing new escape > codes to allow applications to better control the behaviour of this one > feature, why do you stop there? Why still limit yourself to the bonds of > vt102? Did I stay I'll stop here? No, I presented one step, without saying anything about what might be the next one I tackle. (Okay, I drafted out some ideas for continuing this work, and I said things about what will definitely _not_ be the next step, as far as I'm concerned.) > Once you take that first step towards the new control codes, why not simply > come up with a new scheme? Why not let me do: > > TERM=newfancything > > And then I'd have a system that supports everything I need: variable with > fonts, proper rtl text, pixel-precise character positioning, all the colours, > inline graphics, etc. Because this would create a brand new world where practically every application has to be heavily adjusted, if not built up from scratch (e.g. for ncurses, I'd expect that a new replacement would have to be designed and created). Because this is not solely an engineering kind of task, but rather something that would need buy-in from a critical set of people (the maintainers of all these libs and apps, and the other popular terminals), which I find unlikely to get, given that for most of these apps the current platform is good enough, and something new would add an significant amount of extra burden for marginal benefits. Because, even if everyone supported the idea, the required amount of design and implementation work would be magnitudes bigger than for BiDi. Because I'm doing one thing at a time. And I honestly just because I came here to announce my work that addresses _one_ thing, I really don't find it a fair question to ask why I didn't address suddenly magnitudes more than that. Because I'm doing this as a hobby project, not as a paid job. If someone offers me a job to do this, we can discuss it. > There is nothing magic about the grid of cells, and once you introduce new > escape sequences, you might as well truly modernise the terminal. The magic about the grid of cells is all the software that were built up with this assumption during the last couple of decades. cheers, egmont