ziglibs/ansi-term

Zig library for dealing with ANSI terminals

ansi-term's Issues

Proposal: Add Color.Default

Right now, a Style has a foreground color and a background color, which are both of type ?Color. In my view, this is supposed to represent that a style does not have a foreground or background color, but I think it may be useful to think about changing this.

Proposal: A Style should represent a complete style which can be drawn onto an ANSI terminal, meaning it is mandatory to specify foreground and background color for a style. But what if an application using this library wants to specify just bold text? Then it can use Color.Default, a new "pseudo"-color. This also makes everything more explicit and transparent.

Previously, if a Style containing only FontStyle.bold and null for foreground and background was applied to a terminal which already had red background applied to it, applying the new style would have a different effect than if the terminal previously had blue background (red and bold vs blue and bold). With the proposed change, programmers apply a Style and can be 100% sure that this specific style is now active on the terminal.

Example of Color.Default: If the terminal currently has red foreground color and the new Style has Color.Default foreground color, the ANSI Reset CSI is written.

custom `format` function

Do you think it would make sense to include a format function, so that Styles can be printed directly?

I added this,

pub fn format(value: Self, comptime _: []const u8, _: std.fmt.FormatOptions, writer: anytype) std.os.WriteError!void {
    try @import("format.zig").updateStyle(writer, value, null);
}

while porting a program away from a different lib, where I had added something similar, and it made the port easy, if suboptimal.

And another thing, when you don't want the cursor to be misplaced, you need yet more escape codes around the bytes that aren't displayed. Currently I have a wrapping writer that adds them as neccessary, but maybe that should be part of the lib in some way?

Would be happy to send patches for those things.

Add ANSI terminal "mocking"

I think it would be nice to include a terminal emulator (basically an interpreter for ANSI escape sequences) in this repository as well. Something along the lines of https://github.com/selectel/pyte for example.

This would enable testing zig libraries and applications which use ANSI escape sequences for correct display without requiring a "real" terminal emulator like xterm and manually checking the output. Maybe this can even help in developing "real" full-featured terminal emulators.

missing cursor modes

it seem missing the cursor mode (e.g. blinking, underscore, solid state... )
most of terminal emulator seem support it:

whit N that is 1...6
echo -en "\e[N q"

API ideas

• implement format fn for Color and FontStyle types
• with custom specifiers:
  if specifier is empty then write CSI-sequence
  bg & fg specifiers for Color type: treat value as background & foreground respectively
  np: don't write CSI prefix for intelligent updates

As result:

   debug.print("{fg} FG red {bg} BG green {} default", { .Red, .Green, .Reset });

Add package file

Add a single file that can be added as a package so people can easily use this library

fails to build on latest zig version

The current build.zig fails to build on the latest version of zig due to std.build no longer existing.

/home/hanna/.cache/zig/p/122007393793c7f8e875d4b7c6f8b80ffff936c43a5ed0f21e111574b7ad9b20f897/build.zig:1:31: error: root struct of file 'std' has no member named 'build'
const Builder = @import("std").build.Builder;
                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^~~~~~
/nix/store/h4y9hqs666rgcq2b0g3zmws05ifs28m8-zig-0.12.0-dev.2139+e025ad7b4/lib/std/std.zig:1:1: note: struct declared here
pub const ArrayHashMap = array_hash_map.ArrayHashMap;
^~~
referenced by:
    build: /home/hanna/.cache/zig/p/122007393793c7f8e875d4b7c6f8b80ffff936c43a5ed0f21e111574b7ad9b20f897/build.zig:3:18
    runBuild__anon_15827: /nix/store/h4y9hqs666rgcq2b0g3zmws05ifs28m8-zig-0.12.0-dev.2139+e025ad7b4/lib/std/Build.zig:1857:50
    remaining reference traces hidden; use '-freference-trace' to see all reference traces

proposal: passing writer just once on init()

Proposal: Use integers for FontStyle

Currently, FontStyle is represented as a (possibly packed after #5) struct of bools.

I think using integer types and bitwise operations, we could achieve better and possibly faster functionality. Consider the following simplified example:

const FontStyle = u3;

const default: FontStyle = 0b000;
const bold: FontStyle = 0b001;
const dim: FontStyle = 0b010;
const italic: FontStyle = 0b100;

Combining font styles can be done with bitwise or; checking for a style can be done with bitwise and.

cc @data-man

Add a doc build step and preferably host these on a github.io site.

I understand the docs generation is not stable yet etc... however it would be nice to have an easy way to read documentation w/o having to read the source for it.

You'll have to google to work out how you can add it as a step in build.zig
I would open a PR but its easier to ask first imo.

Ziglearn docs for this.