State of the Terminal
=====================
March 12, 2024
This is a companion article to my talk at Neovimconf 2023.
I have been using Vim/Neovim as my full time text editor for close to
10 years. I've spent a lot of time in the terminal and have become
very aware of the many flaws and idiosyncrasies of this bizarre
platform. But I also think it gets a lot of things right! And I'm not
alone in this belief: terminal based tools are still widely popular
even in the presence of many alternatives (the StackOverflow
developer survey shows that Neovim is the "most loved" editor 3 years
in a row).
It's only been in the last couple of years that I've begun to dig
deep into the inner workings of how terminal emulators, and the
applications that run inside of them, really work. I've learned that
there is a lot of innovation and creative problem solving happening
in this space, even though the underlying technology is over half a
century old.
I've also found that many people who use terminal based tools
(including shells like Bash and editors like Vim) know very little
about terminals themselves, or some of the modern features and
capabilities they can support.
In this article, we'll discuss some of the problems that terminal
based applications have historically had to deal with (and what the
modern solutions are) as well as some features that modern terminal
emulators support that you may not be aware of.
But first, some (very) brief history.
Background & History
====================
Most terminal emulators today can directly trace their roots back to
the DEC VT100. The VT100 was not the first video terminal, nor was it
the last, but it was the most popular (at the time). And as we've
learned from history many times since, what becomes popular creates
the de facto standard for everything that comes after.
DEC VT100 Jason Scott, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons <
https://gpanders.com/img/DEC_VT100_terminal.jpg>
Video terminals were an improvement on the teletype machines that
preceded them. They could move the cursor around the screen to create interactive interfaces. They could use color, and clear and redraw
their displays quickly without feeding out reams of paper.
Different video terminals had their own unique way of doing things
using unique, proprietary escape codes (a sequence of bytes beginning
with the escape 0x1b character). This made life difficult for
applications because they had to know which of these sequences to
use. Libraries and helper programs (e.g. termcap) were created to
help ameliorate these issues (we still live with the descendant of
these early libraries, terminfo).
Eventually, formal standards were created, such as ECMA-48 and ANSI
X3.64 (from which the term "ANSI escape codes" derives), which
defined a set of standard escape sequences. The DEC VT100 was the
first video terminal to support these new standards. Its popularity,
combined with the new standards, meant that programs now had a set of
known good escape sequences they could reliably use. Its popularity
spawned many clones, which in turn supported the same sequences for compatibility with applications.
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code>
Graphical window systems eventually replaced hardware video
terminals, but users still wanted to use the terminal based programs
they were accustomed to (you know how those vi people are). In 1984,
work began on a software terminal emulator at MIT. This emulator
became part of the X project and was named Xterm. Xterm implemented
its own features which did not exist on the video terminals it
emulated, such as mouse tracking and a configurable color palette.
These features were in turn copied by Xterm clones, until eventually
Xterm itself became the new de facto standard.
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xterm>
Terminal Emulator Basics
========================
Terminal based applications write two kinds of data to the terminal
emulator: printable text that is displayed to the user, and control
codes, which modify the terminal emulator's state. Control codes are
either single bytes in the C0 character set (bytes 0x00 through 0x1f)
or sequences of bytes that begin with the escape character (0x1b).
These sequences are most commonly referred to as "escape sequences",
and it is these sequences that do the bulk of the heavy lifting in
terminal applications.
Most control codes from the C0 character set are not used today, but
regardless of experience with terminals or terminal applications,
most developers are likely familiar with control codes such as \r
(carriage return), which moves the cursor to the beginning of the
current line, and \n (line feed), which moves the cursor to the next
line.
Escape sequences are varied and numerous, but the vast majority used
in practice fall into one of three categories: Control Sequence
Introducer (CSI), Device Control String (DCS), and Operating System
Command (OSC).
CSI sequences are those which begin with the prefix ESC [ (0x1b
0x5b). Escape sequences in this category are those which reposition
the cursor, change the cursor style, clear the screen, set foreground
and background colors, and more.
OSC sequences are those which begin with the prefix ESC ] and are
typically used for things that modify or interact with the user's
environment outside of the terminal emulator itself (hence the name
"Operating System Command"). Examples are reading from or writing to
the system clipboard, changing the title of the terminal emulator's
window, or sending desktop notifications.
Xterm maintains a list of all of the control sequences it supports on
its website, which, along with vt100.net, forms an informal pseudo-specification for VT100 emulators. Note that this list may not
contain some control sequences used by other, modern terminal
emulators for features which Xterm does not support (e.g. the Kitty
keyboard protocol, which we'll discuss later).
<
https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html>
<
https://vt100.net/>
Escape sequences are actually quite easy to use, and you can even do
it straight from your shell. Try running the following command from
any shell:
printf '\e[1;32mHello \e[0;4;31mworld!\n\e[0m'
This command will print the text "Hello world!", with "Hello" in
green, bold text and "world!" in red, underlined text.
The escape sequences used here are of the form CSI <parameters> m,
which is so common it has its own name: Select Graphic Rendition
(SGR). The SGR escape sequence sets foreground and background colors
for all printed text. The first escape sequence in the example
\e[1;32m enables the bold attribute (1) and sets the foreground color
to green (32). The second escape sequence \e[0;4;31m first clears any
existing styles (0), then enables the underline attribute (4), and
finally sets the foreground text color to red (31). Finally, the last
escape sequence \e[0m resets all styles back to their defaults.
Another use case for simple CSI sequences is redrawing text on the
screen on an already existing line (e.g. for a progress bar or text
that updates itself over time). Hint: look at \r, CSI A, and CSI K.
Most escape sequences are sent from the application to the terminal
emulator, but occasionally the terminal emulator sends escape
sequences to the application. Usually this is done in response to a
query from the application (for instance, to determine if a certain
mode is set).
Problems & Solutions
====================
Terminal emulators are descended from old, legacy technologies, which
brings with it its fair share of problems. Many of these problems
have been (mostly) solved, or at least ameliorated, while others are
still active areas of innovation and research.
Key Encoding
------------
Terminal emulators and terminal applications communicate through a
stream of bytes. When a user presses a key the terminal sends the
byte representation of the character associated with that key. The
old video terminals only supported ASCII so this was, generally,
fairly straightforward.
Modifier keys like Ctrl and Alt complicate this situation. Alt
modified keys are encoded by prefixing the character with an Esc. But
this has a problem: including an extra Esc byte for the Alt modifier
introduces ambiguity between Alt modified key presses and two
separate key presses. When an application sees Esc C, should it
interpret it as Alt-C or did the user press Esc and then press C?
Applications usually solve this by measuring the amount of time
between Esc and the next character. If the time is less than some
defined interval, it is considered an Alt modified key press (Vim
uses the ttimeoutlen option, tmux uses the escape-time option).
Ctrl modified keys are an even bigger problem. When Ctrl is used as a
modifier, the shifted2 version of the key has the 7th bit masked off
(for example, C is 0x43 and after masking the 7th bit the byte
becomes 0x03). This means that not only can the Shift modifier not be
used in conjunction with Ctrl, but that certain Ctrl modified keys
are completely indistinguishable from other control codes.
For instance, when you press the Return key the terminal emulator
sends the byte \r (0x0d) to the application. But if you press Ctrl-M
then the terminal emulator also sends the byte 0x0d to the
application (M is 0x4d in ASCII, so when the 7th bit is masked out,
it becomes 0x0d). From the application's perspective, there is
literally no way to distinguish these two events.
For a long time this meant that certain modified keys like Ctrl-I,
Ctrl-J, and Ctrl-M could not be used in terminal applications like
Vim. There have been a few attempts to solve this problem: the first
came from Xterm in 2006 through the modifyOtherKeys option. Paul
Evans (author of libvterm and libtickit) introduced an alternate key
encoding using the CSI u escape sequence in an essay which is
sometimes colloquially referred to as "fixterms". The CSI u encoding
proposed by Evans was extended by Kovid Goyal, the author of the
kitty terminal emulator, in what has become known as the kitty
keyboard protocol.
<
https://invisible-island.net/xterm/modified-keys.html>
<
http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/>
<
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/>
What all of these solutions have in common is that key presses are
sent to the terminal application encoded as escape sequences. This
eliminates any ambiguity for modified keys and enables certain
modifier combinations (such as Ctrl + Shift) that are not possible
using "legacy" encoding. The CSI u encoding proposed by Evans and
adapted by kitty encodes a modified key press like Ctrl-M as
\e[109;5u. The encoding of unmodified key presses like Return depend
on which "level" of the kitty keyboard protocol is enabled.
Applications can opt-in to different levels to ease adoption (for
instance, Neovim uses only the first level, "Disambiguate escape
keys"). See the kitty documentation for more details.
<
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/>
Sending key presses as escape sequences requires that terminal
applications are able to recognize and parse those sequences, so it
is not something that "just works" out of the box. However, the kitty
keyboard protocol has been widely adopted by both modern terminal
emulators and terminal applications. Terminals which support the
kitty keyboard protocol (to some degree) include Wezterm, Alacritty,
kitty, foot, Ghostty, and iTerm2. Applications which support the
kitty keyboard protocol (to some degree) include Vim, Neovim, Helix,
kakoune, and nushell. This means that when using one of these
applications in one of these terminals, all of the key encoding
problems discussed above (as well as some others which were not
discussed...) are solved.
Decorations
-----------
Xterm has supported 256 user specified colors since 1999. These
colors could be changed at runtime using an escape sequence (OSC 4),
which can be used to great effect (see "8 Bit & '8 Bitish'
Graphics-Outside the Box" by Mark Ferrari for an incredible
demonstration, or install notcurses and run notcurses-demo j in your
terminal).
<
https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_111>
<
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0>
<
https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses>
Within the last decade or so, 24 bit color (sometimes referred to as "truecolor" or "RGB color") has become widely supported by terminal
emulators which allows terminal applications to use whatever
arbitrary colors they want. This provides terminal UIs a much greater
degree of flexibility and creative freedom.
Modern terminals also support other kinds of "rich" text markup, such
as strikethrough and various types of underlines. For instance, text
editors like Vim and Neovim can add a red squiggly line under
misspelled words (as seen in many graphical rich text editors).
Examples of markup styles supported by modern terminal emulators <
https://gpanders.com/img/terminal_styles.png>
It is also possible to display images and even videos inline inside
of terminal emulators. There are (at least) three different ways to
do this (sixels, the iTerm2 image protocol, and the kitty graphics
protocol) and support among terminal emulators varies. Unfortunately
this means that terminal applications are in a bit of an awkward
situation, as they must either implement support for all of the image protocols, or only support a subset of terminals. For this reason,
use of images in terminal applications is still relatively uncommon.
<
https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel>
<
https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html>
<
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/>
<
https://charm.sh/>
It is important to note that advances in terminal based UIs are not
only due to the efforts of terminal emulators, but also to the
creativity and talent of terminal application and library authors.
For example, see some of the fantastic work that charm.sh has done
creating delightful, interactive terminal based user interfaces that
rival (and in some cases, surpass!) graphical UIs for similar tools.
Capability Determination
------------------------
Terminal emulators do not all support the same features. In some
cases, the same feature is implemented in different ways. Terminal
applications need some way to know which features the terminal
they're running in support and how to properly use those features.
Today this is primarily done using a distributed database of
"terminfo" files. The terminal emulator uses the $TERM environment
variable to communicate to terminal applications which terminfo file
to use to lookup which capabilities the terminal supports.
This has a multitude of problems, however. The terminfo database is
part of the ncurses library, and different operating systems and
distributions package different versions of ncurses. This was a
problem for tmux users on macOS for many years because the version of
ncurses packaged with macOS was so old that it did not even include
the tmux-256color terminfo entry at all!
<
https://gpanders.com/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-using- tmux-256color-on-macos/>
This is also a problem for newer terminals which have not yet been
added to the ncurses terminfo database. Terminal emulators can (and
often do) ship their own terminfo entries which are used by
applications running on the same system as the terminal emulator
itself. But when connecting to a remote system (e.g. with SSH), the
terminfo database on the remote system will not have the terminfo
entry and the user is met with cryptic warnings like WARNING:
terminal is not fully functional and applications not functioning
properly.
To circumvent this issue, many terminals use xterm-256color as their
$TERM value, essentially claiming to be Xterm even though they are
not, piggybacking on Xterm's ubiquity. This creates a vicious cycle,
as terminal applications often hardcode special cases for
xterm-256color, which incentivizes terminals to claim to be
xterm-256color, which incentivizes applications to special case
xterm-256color, which... and so on. The problem is exacerbated by
common (bad) advice to users facing problems with terminal
applications to simply override $TERM to be xterm-256color (the Xterm
FAQ itself warns against this).
<
https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#xterm_generic-id>
Unfortunately there are no easy fixes for these problems, but there
is hope. The vast majority of escape sequences used by applications
today are common across most (if not all) modern terminal emulators.
This makes terminfo less necessary since applications can usually
safely assume that a given escape sequence will "just work".
In addition, terminal emulators increasingly support applications
querying support for certain capabilities. For instance, applications
can query the terminal for support of the kitty keyboard protocol
mentioned above and only enable it if the terminal responds that it
is supported. A nice property of escape sequence queries is they
still work even over remote login connections like SSH.
Some new TUI libraries, such as vaxis, are designed specifically to
avoid using terminfo at all and exclusively use queries to determine
feature capabilities. As more applications, libraries, and terminal
emulators move in this direction, terminfo will become increasingly unnecessary.
<
https://git.sr.ht/~rockorager/vaxis>
System Integration
------------------
One of the many advantages of software terminal emulators over
hardware video terminals is that they are one piece of a larger,
integrated computing system. Modern terminal emulators support many
escape sequences to interact with their broader environment. These
sequences are generally known as Operating System Commands (OSCs) and
are often referred to by the numeric integer which appears after the
OSC prefix.
Some of the more popular OSC sequences are OSC 2 for setting the
title of the terminal emulator's window (used frequently by shells
and text editors), OSC 8 for creating clickable hyperlinks, OSC 9 for
sending desktop notifications, and OSC 52 for interacting with the
system clipboard.
<
https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda>
You can test these sequences out for yourself. Try running the
following in your shell:
printf '\e]9;This is a notification!\a'
If your terminal emulator supports OSC 9, you will see a desktop
notification appear with the text, "This is a notification!" (some
terminals or operating systems may not display a notificaton for the
focused application. In that case, add a sleep 2 before the printf
command and quickly change focus to another window).
<
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/desktop-notifications/>
Terminals which support OSC 8 can create clickable hyperlinks. For
instance, try running the below command:
URL="
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
LABEL="Click me for an awesome video!"
printf '\e]8;;%s\a%s\n\e]8;;\a' "$URL" "$LABEL"
You will see the text "Click me for an awesome video!". If your
terminal emulator supports OSC 8, the text will be clickable (perhaps
requiring a modifier key like Shift or Command to be held) and might
be styled with an underline or some other visual affordance to
indicate that the text is a hyperlink. Clicking on the text will open
your web browser to the (perfectly innocuous) embedded URL.
A long standing issue for terminal based text editors like Vim is
clipboard management in remote sessons. A strength of Vim is that it
can be run just as easily in a remote SSH session as it can locally;
however, the remote SSH session is not able to communicate with the
clipboard on your local system, so it is not possible to copy text
inside of Vim on the remote session to your clipboard.
Vim addresses this by (optionally) linking against X11 and allowing
users to forward their X connection to the remote server, allowing
Vim on the remote server to copy text to the X clipboard on the local
system. And while this does work, it has its own problems (users must
use a version of Vim compiled against X11, with the optional
+clipboard feature enabled, and use X11 as their display server, and
remember to forward the X connection to the remote system).
A better solution is to copy data to the clipboard through the
terminal emulator directly. An application running in the terminal
can use the OSC 52 escape sequence to write a Base64 encoded string
to the terminal emulator. The terminal then decodes the string and
copies the data into the system clipboard. The terminal emulator does
not know or care whether the application that sent the sequence is
running remotely or not, which means this works on any system with
zero dependencies.
Pasting (reading) from the clipboard has serious security
implications, because any program in the terminal (even ones on
remote servers) can request the clipboard contents of the user's
system. For this reason, most terminal emulators disable reading from
the clipboard by default, or require the user to explicitly allow it
with a prompt.
Neovim recently added builtin support for using OSC 52 and it will
enabled for users by default (if the terminal emulator supports it)
in the forthcoming 0.10 release.
Conclusion
==========
While it's true that terminals, as an application platform, are
idiosyncratic and quirky, their portability, ubiquity, and relative
ease of use (for application authors) makes them increasingly popular
for many developers, even in the face of an increasing number of
alternatives.
This article is not exhaustive, but it is not meant to be. There are
other challenges that both terminal emulator and terminal application
authors face that are not discussed here, as well as other areas of
innovation and creative exploration. Some examples: better grapheme
clustering, synchronized output to avoid "flickering" in redraw-heavy
UIs, and custom shaders to create arbitrary visual effects.
<
https://mitchellh.com/writing/grapheme-clusters-in-terminals>
<
https://gist.github.com/christianparpart/
d8a62cc1ab659194337d73e399004036>
Terminal emulators are not static: they continue to evolve and
innovate to solve users' problems and improve users' experience. The
underlying technology is old: downright ancient by the standards of
modern tech. But, instead of a flaw, I consider this a strength: it
gives me confidence that while individual terminal emulators may come
and go, the underlying platform will endure.
References & Further Reading
============================
The TTY demystified
<
http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/>
What happens when you press a key in your terminal? <
https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/07/20/pseudoterminals/>
A history of the tty <
https://computer.rip/2024-02-25-a-history-of-the-tty.html>
Understanding ASCII (and terminals)
<
https://bestasciitable.com/>
Comprehensive keyboard handling in terminals <
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol/>
Fix Keyboard Input on Terminals - Please <
http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/>
Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators <
https://mitchellh.com/writing/grapheme-clusters-in-terminals>
From: <
https://gpanders.com/blog/state-of-the-terminal/>
See also:
Colored and styled underlines in Kitty <
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/underlines/>
Curly Underlines in Kitty + Tmux + Neovim <
https://evantravers.com/articles/2021/02/05/ curly-underlines-in-kitty-tmux-neovim/>
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