[rockorager]

The state of the art here is to detect mode 2027, and enable it when supported. This lets you know the terminal will handle graphemes properly.

I maintain two TUI libraries which use this technique and emoji support has been (nearly) great. (One of which uses your uniseg library!)

https://mitchellh.com/writing/grapheme-clusters-in-terminals

[kevin_thibedeau]

That isn't sufficient. Codepoints with ambiguous width can't be detected in a standard way. A large number of pre-emoji symbols have been upgraded to have emoji presentation. Some systems default them to emojis with wide rendering, others maintain the text presentation with narrow rendering. Many systems ignore the presentation selectors if you want to force it.

[sweeter]

really great read, thanks. Im a little disappointed that no terminal emulator both implements the Kitty image protocol, and mode 2027. I wish there would be a terminal project that would just pick the best standards we have at the moment. Im not a fan of sixel for a lot of reasons. Im looking forward to trying Ghostty, though.

[rockorager]

Ghostty has both mode 2027 and kitty image protocol

[eNV25]

wezterm has both according to the above article

[Joker_vD]

I personally don't think this mode is all that very useful, to be fair. First of all, the grapheme clustering is not set in stone, it's been changed from one Unicode standard version to other.

Second, and this is mostly because my personal use cases are very humble, a much, much simple to implement workaround, for everyone involved, would be a couple of OSC sequences which would mark a part of output text as the prompt (when terminal is in canonical/cooked mode), so that a huge chunk of readline could be simply thrown away.

So your program could just print a prompt, and then simply read the cooked line. In the meanwhile, the terminal emulator would handle line editing, line-wrapping and asynchronous output: if you keep outputing text to the terminal while a prompt is active, the terminal would clear the prompt and the unfinished line, print the text, then re-display the prompt and the line; basically what all "async readline" libraries do already with rl_clear/rl_redisplay — but doing it in the terminal would take care of this properly, because the terminal definitely knows how wide all the symbols it itself thinks are. And the tab completion could be supported by returning a <TAB>-terminated line to the program, instead of an <LF>-terminated line.

Unfortunately, I don't think something like this can actually become even moderately widely adopted.

Edit: Or, you know, maybe we could extend terminfo? Like, introduce twcswidth() function that would take your string, and the somehow encoded Unicode grapheme clustering data that the current terminal is actually using which you can query from terminfo, and return the number of screen cells it would take on this terminal.

[ori_b]

At this point, why not just write a graphical program?