2015/10/26

Latest libvterm / pangoterm work

Since it's been a while since I wrote anything, and I've lately been doing some work on both pangoterm and the underlying libvterm I thought I'd write a little post summarising the recent updates.

Pangoterm

Two new features now supported in pangoterm are bracketed paste mode, and configurable basic and high-brightness palettes.

Bracketed paste mode is a feature that applications can enable, which causes text pasted into the terminal via the clipboard to be surrounded by special markers indicating this fact. Applications like text editors can make use of these markers to interpret the keystrokes that arrive as literal text, overriding whatever other meaning they might wish to apply during that time.

There's also a few bugfixes; interpretation of numeric keypad events and IME handling (written by FireFly on Freenode), and a fix for cells with the maximally-supported set of combining chars applied (such as so-called Zalgotext).

libvterm

On the libvterm front, there is now a second set of callbacks at the State and Screen layers, to allow embedding applications to at least inspect CSI, DCS or OSC strings that libvterm itself doesn't understand, thus allowing some method of extension by applications. I'm not terribly happy with the interface shape of these yet - it will likely change in future - but for now it serves its purpose to satisfy Neovim.

There's a fix for an awkward bug I've been trying to isolate for a while, which involved the Screen layer in its most aggressive optimisation setting, where there is a pending scrollrect and pending damage, and another scrollrect arrives. This illusive bug was the cause of occasional rendering failures during scroll after a quick line edit in command shells, and similar situations.