Classically, because the terminal is a grid of equally sized characters, only a single text size was supported in terminals, with one minor exception, some characters were allowed to be rendered in...
Golly, do I have mixed feelings about this. Both as a developer of TUI programs - in which determining the width of a widget is already a complex operation (same as in GUIs) - but also as a user who is already occasionally frustrated by double-width Unicode characters in terminals, which frequently don’t handle navigating such text well or correctly. I can only imagine the chaos this will introduce into text selection, text editors, and readline.
OTOH, very cool. Unicode combining characters have great, mostly unrealized, potential, in no small part to consequential sizing issues.
OTOOH, the world of computing is now a little more complex. Is the added complexity necessary, or just feature creep?
Like many things in tech, the command line was created when nothing like it existed before and over time it has gained unique traits that make it appealing (SSHing, programs tending to be open source and cross platform, mouseless UIs, etc.) but also lack things that alternatives, for instance multiple font sizes. Thus the need to reinvent the wheel like this. I made this post Is the line between TUIs and GUIs blurring? What’s the difference in rendering and compute demand between them? which got 64 comments.
Same thing with the web really, a lot reinventing of the wheel of what OSes do, but there was nothing like it before where devices across the world communicate with each other, hence less need for things like sandboxing completely un-trusted code and a comprehensive app permission system (location, camera, etc.).
Golly, do I have mixed feelings about this. Both as a developer of TUI programs - in which determining the width of a widget is already a complex operation (same as in GUIs) - but also as a user who is already occasionally frustrated by double-width Unicode characters in terminals, which frequently don’t handle navigating such text well or correctly. I can only imagine the chaos this will introduce into text selection, text editors, and readline.
OTOH, very cool. Unicode combining characters have great, mostly unrealized, potential, in no small part to consequential sizing issues.
OTOOH, the world of computing is now a little more complex. Is the added complexity necessary, or just feature creep?
Like many things in tech, the command line was created when nothing like it existed before and over time it has gained unique traits that make it appealing (SSHing, programs tending to be open source and cross platform, mouseless UIs, etc.) but also lack things that alternatives, for instance multiple font sizes. Thus the need to reinvent the wheel like this. I made this post Is the line between TUIs and GUIs blurring? What’s the difference in rendering and compute demand between them? which got 64 comments.
Same thing with the web really, a lot reinventing of the wheel of what OSes do, but there was nothing like it before where devices across the world communicate with each other, hence less need for things like sandboxing completely un-trusted code and a comprehensive app permission system (location, camera, etc.).