Pádraig Brady wrote: > You could determine that programatically with something like: > > if os.system(r'{ tput bold || tput md; } >/dev/null 2>&1') == 0: > # enable bold output
Thanks for the hint, but this way of doing introduces more complexity. There are basically 4 situations regarding TERM: (A) The terminal supports the ANSI escapes for bold 94% and TERM's name starts with 'xterm'. (B) The terminal supports the ANSI escapes for bold 3% and TERM's name is something else (e.g. 'linux' etc.) (C) The terminal supports some other escapes for bold. 1% (E.g. vt52) (D) The terminal does not support bold. 2% (E.g. emacs with TERM=dumb.) The gnulib-tool code captures only the situation (A), i.e. uses bold face only for 94% of the users, but the escape sequence is correct always. What you propose captures the situations (A)+(B)+(C), i.e. uses bold face for 98% of the users, but requires `tput bold` and `tput sgr0`, otherwise we produce wrong output in case (C). Bruno