@ewhac

77 Followers
61 Following
1.2K Posts

Software engineer of a Certain Age, particularly with low-level and embedded systems, and device drivers. Closet extrovert.

(It's pronounced " 'eɪ.wæk ".)

All opinions expressed are solely my own, on my own behalf, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Home Pagehttps://ewhac.org/
YouTube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/c/ewhac
GitHubhttps://github.com/ewhac

Dear #LazyWeb: Is there a central, comprehensive list of all the extensions to Terminfo that are currently floating around?

Today, I learned about the `Smulx` capability, which lets you underline text in a variety of styles. This capability is not an official part of Terminfo (i.e. it doesn't appear in the terminfo(5) man page), but apparently is something that first showed up in Kitty, and is now spreading. See also VTE, alacritty, etc.

Surely, someone's keeping a list...?

6/6: So I'm sitting there, wondering what alternatives might be available, when it occurred to me: Why is Pandoc's only terminal writer for ANSI? Why isn't there an `ncurses` writer, which would support whatever TERM is set to? So I thought, "Maybe I could write this myself." And the user could set mappings from Pandoc styles to ncurses attributes...

...Pandoc, and all of its readers/writers, are written in Haskell.

Yes, there is a Lua interface -- it's unclear whether that's enough.

5/N: Yet Another Problem: Skylighting has no obvious way of controlling the mapping from Pandoc styles to ANSI escape codes. So if it thinks italic text should be rendered in a different color, it appears in that color, even if your terminal and font both support displaying actual italicized text.

4/N: In the case of Markdown, there's a rather nice tool called Pandoc which can translate between a huge number of text document formats. One of the supported input formats is Markdown. And one of the output formats is ANSI -- the most popular codes for controlling text appearance on a terminal.

Problem: The default ANSI output styling from Pandoc is kinda crap.

Another Problem: The ANSI output is handled by an external library called Skylighting.

3/N: Mutt can render plain text, and it can also render "enriched" text -- an obscure standard no one uses, because it suffers from similar readability issues as HTML. But it doesn't do anything with Markdown, just displaying the source code.

Well, no problem, Mutt can push the email body through an external filter program. This is how HTML-formatted email is made readable in Mutt, by piping it through `w3m` or `elinks` or `lynx`.

2/N: Now it also happens that I'm a fan of Markdown, a very lightweight document markup syntax that lets you apply some modest styling to your writing without making your source document unreadable. As an example, if you wanted to emphasize some text in HTML, you'd have to do it <STRONG>like this,</STRONG>, but in Markdown it's done **like this.** In other words, Markdown adds syntactical meaning to the kinds of emphasis markers we'd likely add to plain text files.

1/N: This is kind of illustrative of the current state of my "thought process" in These Modern Times.

I still use Mutt, a terminal-based email handling program. Mutt makes you focus on what's important -- the body of the email, and leaves everything else for external programs.

Video of the #NoKings human banner in #SanFrancisco at Ocean Beach.

Message reads “TRUMP MUST GO NOW!"

I'm in the bottom right "W"

From Brendan Gutenschwager @BGOnTheScene

OpenAI, Anthropic, Gr0k, Gemini, DeepSeek, Quen... I think I finally figured out what they all are.

...They're GIR.

...From "Invader Zim."

Because when anyone asks why they're so stupid, the purveyors always reply, "It's not stupid. It's advaaaaanced!"

https://youtu.be/I93yg0ABFko

Invader Zim- Birth Of Gir

YouTube

The view count on these music videos is criminally low. See if you can do something about that. (If ever you were a fan of Warner Bros. cartoons, these should be a very easy watch.)

https://youtu.be/MII6UU9TNbI

https://youtu.be/VMmD_N6u384

Toy Trumpet from Raymond Scott Reimagined

YouTube