contour VS terminal-unicode-core

Another problem is that the cursor moves while the screen is buffer is being rendered. The location is only really known once the cursor settles in the same place for some time, which is unacceptable in terms of latency.

The synchronized output extension could be used to do this, though. https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour/blob/master/docs...

https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour/issues/382

This apparently does not support the Kitty graphics protocol, just Sixel, which makes it look fairly unattractive to me, personally.

contour - https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour. https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour/issues/100 and other modern unicode focused attempts to update the terminal world

contour : a terminal application

https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour Contour has a implementation for this. See this release: https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour/releases/tag/v0.3.6.240

Now that I'm well rested I decided to compile some similar terminal emulators with clang++ and rustc to see how big of a gap we're looking at. For the C++ terminal emulator I compiled contour with ~80k lines of C++ and over 200k lines when accounting for dependencies (not including dynamically linked dependencies), and then I'm using alacritty with ~35k lines of Rust and over 2 million (!) lines for the whole dependency tree when vendoring all dependencies. Because Rust tries to make most software cross platform with conditional compilation and many of these aren't Linux specific libraries I'm gonna assume it's compiling half or two thirds of the lines of dependencies for this experiment with the C++ compiling probably 3/4ths of the dependency tree considering I'm not on windows.

I have my eyes on this though.

> It would be nice if someone worked on actually improving the terminal experience.

Contour. Oh, sorry, I mean: To be honest? There are plenty of young terminals that work on that, it's not just Contour, but also WezTerm, foot, Ghostty, Warp, and Terminal.click (even though I am strongly against their architecture). Also Charm and Fig should earn an honorable mention.

> Selecting, copying and pasting text is still pretty awful

Use the vi-like normal mode in Contour and that should(tm) fix almost all of the above problems. At least I have almost never touched a mouse again on Contour since I've implemented modal input in Contour. Well, I use the mouse, casually for scrolling and procrastinating by randomly clicking around. :)

> (why is the cursor an entire block rather than a I bar?).

this is configurable in recent terminals

> Editing multiline inputs is awful.

this should be implemented by your shell or readline, in case you want to improve here. your TE has nothing to do with this except that it provides the tools to realize that on the screen :)

> Navigating history is so-so (even with McFly etc.).

This is the job of the shell/readline.

> Anything more complicated than left/right/up/down fails half the time and dumps control characters instead.

I really cannot related that claim to anything I am experiencing in my own life. Sadly.

> Why are terminals always stuck in the 70s? Can I get a modern terminal?

To be fair, they are not named "emulator" for fun and giggles. But I agree, not every VT sequence or semantic should be blindingly implemented. Especially the Unicode case on Terminals were always a fight against the historian terminal emulator developers. I asked myself why a lot on that matter. My theory? Because it potentially requires those existing terminals to fully re-write their core code base in order to be fully (as full as it gets) Unicode aware.

Have a look here for a baby-step forward: https://github.com/contour-terminal/terminal-unicode-core

This is implemented by 4 terminals (Ghostty, WezTerm, foot, Contour). One bite at a time I guess. Let's just stay positive, we can't break the world! (Terminal.Click? You listening?) But we should certainly break here and there when it makes sense and also not blindingly implement the 70s again. The GUI has also good moments and can live next to the TUI ;)

Some other terminal emulator developers and I have started to address at least some of the many Unicode problems that are up until now undefined behavior by creating a formal specification on how a terminal emulator should behave in a backward and forward compatible way so that app developers and users will benefit.