Re: [dev] ASCII Delimited Text

From: Raphaël Proust <sub_AT_bnwr.net>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2018 08:55:43 +0800

Hi,

On 2018-05-22 21:21, Adrian Grigore wrote:
>> Maybe a nice thing to have would be to get the terminal emulator to
> treat the field and record separator in a special way. So the programs
> all output fs and rs, and the terminal emulator uses these characters to
> layout the data in a tabular way.
>
> There's no terminal that does this, right?

None that I know of.


There is https://github.com/unconed/TermKit which has “Rich output for
common tasks and formats, using MIME types + sniffing”. In practice,
this means that if you `cat foo.png` it'll show up as an image and if
you `cat foo.html` it'll show the output with syntax colouring.

But it's not a text-based terminal emulator: it's written in javascript
and runs on top of a chromeless browser.


I think it should be possible to have some level of “rich output”
without ruining all the benefits of a simple and consistent text-based
system. Tabulating output based on fs/rs would be one thing.

OTOH, you might as well just pipe the output through a layout program
that transform all the fs/rs into characters appropriate for visual
inspection.


Bye,
-- Raphaël
Received on Wed May 23 2018 - 02:55:43 CEST

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