Re: [dev] [st] wide characters

From: Christoph Lohmann <20h_AT_r-36.net>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2013 08:10:22 +0200

Greetings.

On Sun, 14 Apr 2013 08:10:22 +0200 Random832 <random832_AT_fastmail.us> wrote:
> I am forced to ask, though, why character cell values are stored in
> utf-8 rather than as wchar_t (or as an explicitly unicode int) in the
> first place, particularly since the simplest way to detect a wide
> character is to call the function wcwidth. What was the reason for this
> design decision? It doesn't save any space, since on most systems
> UTF_SIZ == sizeof(int) == sizeof(wchar_t).

That design decision can change when I’m actually implementing the dou‐
ble‐width and double‐height support in st. The codebase is small enough
to change such a type in less than 10 minutes. So no religion was intro‐
duced here.

> And I don't know the st codebase well enough (or at all, really) to tell
> at a glance what would have to be changed to be able to support a
> double-width character cell, or to support wrapping to the next line if
> one is output at the second-to-last column.

I hadn't yet the time to read all the double-width implementations in other
terminals so st would do the »right thing« in implementing all questionable
cases.

Double‐width characters are like BCE a design decision applications need
adapt to.

Some corner cases I haven't yet found a good answer to:
        * Is there any standard for this except for setting the flag in
          terminfo and taking up two cells in the terminal?
        * If st has double-width default.
                * What happens if the application does naive character
                  counting? Will layouts break?
                * Is there some way to tell the application that we have
                  double-width support enforced except for the terminfo?
                * How do applications implement this? Is there some historical
                  cruft that will break?
        * With an option to toggle the double-width handling:
                * Is this needed for tmux, screen or other terminal proxies
                  that for example miss BCE too?

These are the questions I miss an answer too before implementing this.
The code isn’t a problem.


Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann
Received on Sun Apr 14 2013 - 08:10:22 CEST