[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Trying to fix slang



On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 12:12:10PM +0000, Phil Blundell wrote:
> I'm not suggesting that the character set should be somehow encoded into
> the value of $TERM.  Rather, I think that an xterm in UTF-8 mode and an
> xterm in iso-8859-1 or whatever mode are simply different types of
> terminal, and they should have different names. 

An xterm in UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, CP437, and Shift-JIS are all slightly
different types of terminal, so by that logic they should all have
slightly different names.  (The characters represented by byte sequences
is just as important a property of terminals as escape codes for moving
the cursor.)

> > Don't forget that changing terminal names means breaking $TERM
> > compatibility with every older system out there, too.
> 
> Sure, but adding UTF-8 support without changing $TERM silently breaks
> runtime compatibility (by advertising an alternate character set that
> doesn't actually work) which seems a great deal worse.

Dickey's reply was that a solution is to make the acsc string support
multibyte characters.  He said that most apps don't touch this directly,
so for the most part, only ncurses (and slang) would need changes.
(enacs, smacs, and rmacs would be blank.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard



Reply to: