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notcurses/TERMINALS.md
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Terminals and TERM

With the wrong environment settings, programs can't properly control your terminal. It is critical that the TERM environment variable be correct for your shell, and that the terminfo database entry keyed by this variable be up-to-date. Furthermore, for 24-bit TrueColor, it is necessary to either use a -direct variant of your terminfo entry, or to declare COLORTERM=24bit. The latter instruct Notcurses to use 24-bit escapes regardless of advertised support. If you define this variable, and your terminal doesn't actually support these sequences, you're going to have a bad time.

The following have been established on a Debian Unstable workstation. ccc is the Terminfo can-change-colors capability. "Blocks" refers to whether the terminal provides its own implementation of block-drawing characters, or relies on the font. Patches to correct/complete this table are very welcome!

Terminal Pixel TIOCGWINSZ ccc Blocks Recommended environment Notes
Alacritty ✅ ✅ ❌ TERM=alacritty COLORTERM=24bit
FBterm ❌ ? ? TERM=fbterm 256 colors, no RGB color.
foot ✅ ✅ ✅ TERM=foot
Gnome Terminal ❌ ✅ TERM=gnome COLORTERM=24bit ccc support is available when run with vte-256color.
Guake ? ?
ITerm2 ? ?
Kitty ✅ ✅ ✅ TERM=xterm-kitty
kmscon ? ? TERM=xterm-256color No RGB color AFAICT, nor any distinct terminfo entry.
Konsole ❌ ❌ ? TERM=konsole-direct
Linux console ❌ ✅ see below TERM=linux COLORTERM=24bit 8 (512 glyph fonts) or 16 (256 glyph fonts) colors max, but RGB values are downsampled to a 256-index palette. See below.
mlterm ✅ ❌ ? TERM=mlterm-256color Do not set COLORTERM. mlterm-direct gives strange results.
PuTTY ❌ ❌ TERM=putty-256color COLORTERM=24bit
rxvt ? ?
Sakura ✅ ✅ ? TERM=vte-256color COLORTERM=24bit VTE-derived, no terminfo entry.
GNU Screen ❌ n/a TERM=screen.OLDTERM Must be compiled with --enable-256color. TERM should typically be screen. suffixed by the appropriate TERM value for the true connected terminal, e.g. screen.vte-256color. See below.
st ("suckless") ✅ ✅ ? TERM=st-256color COLORTERM=24bit
Terminator ✅ ? ? ?
Terminology ❌ ? ? ?
Tilda ? ? ?
tmux ❌ n/a TERM=tmux-256color COLORTERM=24bit tmux.conf must apply Tc; see below. bce is available with the tmux-256color-bce definition.
wezterm ✅ ? TERM=wezterm COLORTERM=24bit
Windows Terminal ? ? ?
wterm ? ? ?
XFCE4 Terminal ❌ ✅ ✅ TERM=xfce COLORTERM=24bit No xfce-direct variant exists.
XTerm ✅ ? ❌ TERM=xterm+256color2 COLORTERM=24bit See note about DirectColor. Must configure with --enable-direct-color. TERM=xterm-direct seems to have the undesirable effect of mapping low RGB values to a palette; I don't yet understand this well. The problem is not seen with the specified configuration. Sixel support when built with --enable-sixel-graphics and run in vt340 mode.
Yakuake ? ? ?

Note that xfce4-terminal, gnome-terminal, etc. are essentially skinning atop the common VTE ("Virtual TErminal") library.

Kitty

Kitty has some interesting, atypical behaviors. Foremost among these is that an RGB background color equivalent to the configured default background color will be rendered as the default background. This means, for instance, that if the configured default background color is RGB(0, 0, 0), and is translucent, a background of RGB(0, 0, 0) will be translucent. To work around this, when TERM begins with "kitty", we detect the default background color, and when we would write this as RGB, we alter one of the colors by 1. See https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/3185 and https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1117. This behavior can be demonstrated with the kittyzapper binary (src/poc/kittyzapper.c).

Kitty is furthermore the only terminal I know to lack the bce (Background Color Erase) capability, but Notcurses never relies on bce behavior.

GNU screen

GNU screen does have 24-bit color support, but only in the 5.X series. Note that many distributions ship screen 4.X as of 2020. When built with truecolor support, add truecolor on to your screenrc, or run it with --truecolor. Attempting to force RGB color in screen 4.X will not work.

Add defutf8 on to your screenrc, or run screen with -U, to ensure UTF-8.

tmux

tmux supports 24-bit color through its Tc (Truecolor) extension. You'll need an entry in tmux.conf of the form:

set -ga terminal-overrides ",EXTERNALTERM:Tc"

Where EXTERNALTERM is your TERM variable at the time of attachment, e.g.:

set -ga terminal-overrides ",vte-256color:Tc"

You'll then need COLORTERM=24bit defined within your tmux environment.

The Linux console

The Linux console supports concurrent virtual terminals, and is manipulated by userspace via ioctl()s. These ioctl()s generally fail when applied to a pseudotty device, as will happen if e.g. invoked upon one's controlling terminal whilst running in a terminal emulator under X (it is still generally possible to use them by explicitly specifying a console device, i.e. showconsolefont -C /dev/tty0).

The VGA text console requires the kernel option CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE. A framebuffer console for VESA 2.0 is provided by CONFIG_FB_VESA, while UEFI-compatible systems can use CONFIG_FB_EFI. So long as a framebuffer driver is present, CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE will enable a graphics-mode console using the framebuffer device.

The Linux console can be in either text or graphics mode. The mode can be determined with the KDGETMODE ioctl(), and changed with KDSETMODE, using the constants KD_TEXT and KD_GRAPHICS. Text mode supports a rectangular matrix of multipixel cells, filled with glyphs from a font, a foreground color, and a background color. Graphics ("All-Points-Addressable") mode supports a rectangular matrix of pixels, each with a single color. Note that both modes require appropriate hardware support (and kernel configuration options), and might or might not be available on a given installation. Non-x86 platforms often provide only a framebuffer (graphics) console.

The kernel text mode loosely corresponds to the 1987 IBM VGA definition. At any time, the display is configured with a monospace raster font, a palette, and (when in Unicode mode) a mapping from multibyte sequences to font elements. Up to 16 colors can be used with a font of 256 glyphs or fewer. Only 8 colors can be used with fonts having more than 256 glyphs; the maximum font size in any configuration is 512 glyphs. The keyboard is further configured with a keymap, mapping keyboard scancodes to elements of the character set. These properties are per-virtual console, not common to all of them. These limitations are not typically present on framebuffer consoles.

Exporting COLORTERM=24bit and emitting RGB escapes to the Linux console does work, though the RGB values provided are downsampled to a 256-slot palette. Backgrounds don't seem to have the same degree of flexibility in this situation as do foregrounds. The output is better, but not as much better as one might expect. More research is necessary here.

The following more-or-less standard tools exist:

  • showconsolefont: show the console font
  • setfont: load console font
  • fbset: show and modify framebuffer settings
  • fgconsole: print name of foreground terminal
  • chvt: change the foreground terminal
  • deallocvt: destroy a virtual console
  • dumpkeys: print all keycodes
  • loadkeys: load scancode/keycode mapping (the keymap)
  • setkeycodes: load scancode/keycode mappings one at a time
  • showkeys: interactively print scancodes
  • kbd_mode: show or set the keyboard mode

Both mapscrn and loadunimap are obsolete; their functionality is present in setfont.

Note that Notcurses reprograms the console font table when running in the Linux console (unless NCOPTION_NO_FONT_CHANGES is used). This adds support for half blocks and quadrants.

DirectColor

Many terminals support one or another form of non-indexed color encoding (also known as DirectColor, RGB color, 24-bit color, or the similar but distinct TrueColor), using either the semicolon-based presentation introduced by Konsole or the colon-delimited presentation specified in ECMA-48 and ITU T.416. The rgb termcap capability indicates support for such encodings via the set_a_foreground and set_b_foreground capabilities. Not all terminals implementing rgb use the 3x8bpc model; XTerm for instance:

for values 0 through 7, it uses the “ANSI” control sequences, while for other values, it uses the 3-byte direct-color sequence introduced by Konsole. the number of colors is 224 while the number of color pairs is 216

Thus emitting setaf with an RGB value close to black can result, when using xterm-direct's setaf and rgb definitions, in a bright ANSI color.

Problematic characters

Some characters seem to cause problems with one terminal or another. These are best avoided until the problems are better understood:

  • '­' U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN (some terminals allocate it a cell, some don't)
  • '܏' U+070F SYRIAC ABBREVIATION MARK
  • '۝' U+06DD ARABIC END OF AYAH
  • '࣢' U+08E2 ARABIC DISPUTED END OF AYAH
  • '﷽' U+FDFD ARABIC LIGATURE BISMILLAH AR-RAHMAN AR-RAHEEM '