"James K. Lowden" <jklow...@schemamania.org> wrote: |On Tue, 23 Aug 2016 01:29:07 +0200 |Tadziu Hoffmann <hoffm...@usm.uni-muenchen.de> wrote: .. |> 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?
Oh. I do. .. |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 .. |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. In fact i personally was a bit disappointed to come back to look into Linux about 2012/3 and see that the beautiful framebuffer hasn't proceeded. Before i've switched to FreeBSD ~2001/2 i think that thing came up and there was a simple, clean and documented header in /usr/include that accessed some drawing graphics. And back then i for a moment was almost dreaming it would be possible, just me and the kernel that is, because all i would have needed beside a terminal is a PDF and a graphics viewer. (I didn't know about Plan9, despite the fact it is always graphical. And of course a compiler would never have made it.) There was the Norton/Midnight Commander, but i really wouldn't know of a better way, with full control and power that is, and except for real doing-by-thinking, than a normal shell command line. I admit i never used David Korn's extended shell, because for my everydays' work i have everything i need (including a graphical browser) but that would be a direction that i understand. --steffen
