Re: What capabilities do you wish terminal emulators would report?

[Daniel Colascione]

On 5/8/20 12:34 AM, George Nachman wrote:
> Some terminal emulator authors (VTE, xterm, tmux, mintty, libvterm, 
> iTerm2, and others) are discussing building a new mechanism for 
> reporting capabilities. For context: 
> https://github.com/mintty/mintty/issues/881

Hallelujah.

> My goal is to collect desires from developers of popular applications. 
> What capabilities do you wish you could discover about terminals that 
> you don't already get from terminfo?
>
> For example, being able to detect 24-bit color support, available cursor 
> styles, bracketed paste support, and mouse reporting modes are the kinds 
> of capabilities that would be included. 

I wrote about this issue a little while ago: 
https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/term-is-terminally-broken/10154219967001102/

Using an environment variable might be fine so long as it's *one* 
environment variable, minimizing the pain of transition. But there are 
zillions of scripts and daemons out there that special-case TERM. (For 
example, sudo often puts TERM on an environment variable preservation 
whitelist.) It'd probably be easier to make a new special TERM variable 
that means "I support introspection and also speak xtermeese".

> They would likely be exposed 
> through a combination of a new environment variable and a 
> to-be-determined control sequence that reports them.

Kitty's mechanism for explicitly setting character-cell properties would 
be great to discover too --- it's a much better alternative to BCE.