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by quotemstr 386 days ago
> Ghostty

I bet it has a setting to set TERM. I mean, TERM is hardly a panacea, but it's better than blindly spewing terminal control control codes without configuration or control or feature discovery.

> effectively two output terminal protocols--Windows and ANSI. And there is only a single terminal input protocol (kitty) that isn't brain damaged and allows you to do something super complex like "detect when Shift Key is pressed and released".

And what, every terminal application should have its own special knob for you to tell it what kind of terminal you have?

This whole discussion is a great example of why Chesterton's fence is a thing. The terminal world is already pretty fragmented. Suggestions to ignore the only even halfway decent widely-supported app-agnostic config knob without replacing it with something better are short-sighted. In any multi-party ecosystem, you need some way for different programs, written by different people at different times, to discover each other's capabilities.
1 comments
bsder 386 days ago
> And what, every terminal application should have its own special knob for you to tell it what kind of terminal you have?

No, they should default to the only sane thing left, ignore TERM/termcap/terminfo, and leave the people who still want to run a VT-52 or Tek4014 in the dustbin.

There is a single combination for terminal usage which isn't broken in 2025--ANSI escape codes for output with the Kitty escape codes for input.

(And don't get me started about resolving the dependencies around ncurses, terminfo, etc. because some program is welded to a 15 year old version of curses ...)

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quotemstr 386 days ago
Most terminals are not kitty. Should my program not work with them? What happens when kitty adds a feature? How do I know whether it's supported?

What we really need is robust feature detection, not TERM. The terminal universe doesn't seem particularly receptive to the idea: https://github.com/alacritty/vte/issues/98

In the meantime, we have TERM. I'll stop advocating people use TERM when the terminal ecosystem learns what the web had to learn ages ago and embraces feature detection. It's pointless to break even UA detection.

(Unfortunately, as the thread shows, XTGETCAP is broken in too many places to use.)

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