On Tue, 23 Aug 2016 01:29:07 +0200 Tadziu Hoffmann <hoffm...@usm.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
> > Raw VT-100 escape sequences, in 2016. Where will it all end? > > Steering wheels. On cars. In 2016. Where will it all end? > > Seriously: what's wrong with escape codes? I mean, if you're > still working with a text terminal, I'd expect escape codes to > be your daily bread and butter, not something to scoff at. > (Unless I'm missing the good-natured, approving irony here?) Yes, but who is still working with a text terminal? In 1980, it wouldn't have been unusual, as you know, for a VT-100 to be the user's single interface to the computer. Any UI feature -- font style & variations, menus, mutiple applications, etc. -- had to be rendered on that one screen. It's no wonder it became terrifically complex. They developed programable fonts, 132-column displays, alternate screens. It's a testament to human ingenuity. Today most of those features have been subsumed by the GUI. Different applications have different windows, different fonts, graphics, all resizable. We have a potpourri of UI gadgetry barely imagined in those days. Yet the emulator remains as muscular and complex as ever, just in case someone happens across an RS-232 cable and a line driver. Sadly, for all the advances, documentation has hardly budged, if indeed it's advanced at all. Even though a good deal of it is maintained in typeset form, the output predominately is confined to the application with the poorest text rendering capability: the VT-100 emulator. Because of poverty owing to neglect -- that is, necessity being the mother of invention -- the author of the article I linked to decided he'd like color in his man pages. Where did he turn? A style sheet in the groff framework, perhaps? Any kind of improvement to the semantic-display connection? No, he reached about as far down as possible, and tweaked the control sequences emitted to the emulator. Because he could. Because, in a way, he *had* to, insofar as that strange bit of arcania gave him the most leverage. So, yes, he's still working with a text terminal, after a fashion. But the programmability of that text terminal is an accident of history, its feature set long since made obsolete -- not useless, but out-moded -- by graphical displays and GUIs. That he reached for that particular tool is a measure of how far we have come, and how far we have not. --jkl
