[cryptonector]

I mean, it could be a packet stream where some packets are control packets, and then the Console API could be used and remoted, but you'd need clients that understand it.

The fragility of in-band signaling in the TTY world is not *nix's fault or anything. VMS had that too, since VMS too had to deal with TTYs. The fact is that a) the system evolved from real, hardware TTYs of the 1970s, b) using a text stream with some in-band signaling doesn't even half suck -- mostly it rocks, and all you have to do for it to rock is get the right $TERM value and not output binary files to the tty.

[quotemstr]

https://m.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/term-is-termi...

[cryptonector]

The Windows Console was even more terminally dead. Terminals have their limitations, but honestly, I'll take a terminal, tty/pty, and terminfo, any day over the Windows Console.

[caf]

You also have to sanitise untrusted data that you want to output.

[cryptonector]

And remember to use less -R or else pipe to col(1) or whatever.

[quotemstr]

I want a pipe2(2) flag or an fcntl or something that lets me signal "the other end of this pipe understands ANSI escapes"

[JdeBP]

First of all you have to define "ANSI escape".

Hints:

* You have the wrong country, on the wrong continent.

* It's not as simple in reality as your first answer will be. (-:

[quotemstr]

Yeah, I know

[caf]

I've considered before that you could allow each end of a pipe to set name/value attributes, which can be read by the other end.

[cryptonector]

And now you're reinventing the Windows Console API... :)

I mean, both approaches have their pluses, but the API approach is only ever going to work well for remoting if it is standardized and interoperable. And the installed base of Unix termcap/terminfo programs is huge, so plain old text-with-in-band-controls is not going away anytime soon.

[caf]

With things like SIGWINCH / ioctl(TIOCGWINSZ) we already know what kind of API it is, we are just haggling about the price.