implement some prettyping-inspired display alongside textual data. #3

anarcat · 2013-12-04T15:49:10Z

this is a first stab at porting "prettyping.sh" into noping. the idea is to show a histogram of the ping history.

it is a little rough for now:

it should fallback when the terminal is not unicode-capable
the scaling logic is not fully automatic, which will degenerate (ie. all red or all green) in cases where the latency is close to 255 ms or 1ms with little stddev

this requires switching to the ncursesw library and other unicode ncurses hackery described in this post:

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.games.roguelike.development/2010-09/msg00050.html

pretty ping is a awk/bash script, MIT-licensed, available here:

https://bitbucket.org/denilsonsa/small_scripts/src/tip/prettyping.sh

this is a first stab at porting "prettyping.sh" into noping. the idea is to show a histogram of ping times instead of numerical values. with some work, we could actually show both, but this focuses on implementing the hard part (the histogram) properly. it is very rudimentary for now: * the math may be wrong for the size of the bar, I was mostly in a rush to make unicode work and have something pretty quickly. * all hosts are on the same line: each should have its own line * the histogram should be displayed in a separate window * it should use background colors as well * it should fallback when the terminal is not unicode-capable * the scaling logic is fully automatic, which necessarily gives weird results at first this requires switching to the ncursesw library and other unicode ncurses hackery described in this post: http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.games.roguelike.development/2010-09/msg00050.html pretty ping is a awk/bash script, MIT-licensed, available here: https://bitbucket.org/denilsonsa/small_scripts/src/tip/prettyping.sh

…g times display

…ndow

this was breaking the border

make sure that if we go beyond the max ratio, we just mark it as one

i did this after some stress testing, now it covers the whole range on input

anarcat · 2013-12-04T16:17:14Z

Note that prettyping falls back to regular ASCII characters (_.oO) if unicode is disabled (on the commandline).

Now the questions are:

how do we detect a unicode-capable terminal?
if we can't, how do we disable/enable that feature? another noping binary? nopingu?
what characters do we use in the fallback? _.oO is cute, but I am sure it could be improved with ncurses and ASCII escape codes...

For example, the following program:

#include <ncurses.h>
int main(void)
        {
        int counter;
        initscr();
        attron(A_UNDERLINE);
        mvprintw(0,7,"Progress bar testing\n\n");
        attroff(A_UNDERLINE);
        for (counter=115; counter >= 111; counter--)
          {
            addch(counter | A_ALTCHARSET);
          }
        refresh();
        getch();
        endwin();
        return 0;
        }

... outputs:

       Progress bar testing

⎽⎼─⎻⎺

It renders better on the terminal than here - it progresses actually quite nicely in 5 steps. Not bad!

More information:

octo · 2013-12-04T17:44:10Z

I've sent an email to my favorite terminal expert and CC'ed you. nl_langinfo(3) looks promising.
I guess a command line argument would be best. People and / or distributions who want to have a different command can use aliases and stuff, though I doubt that this will be priority.
I don't have a strong preference. I like you suggestions, both, the cute and the liney one ;) Code page 437 also has some suitable characters, although not as many as Unicode. No idea how portable / universal that would be.

Thanks again and best regards,
—octo

anarcat · 2013-12-04T23:13:03Z

Awesome, let's see what's the magic incantation then we can finish this. :) If you have pointers on how to name the commandline option, it would be appreciated. prettyping uses --unicode, but I feel we should assume unicode and have a flag to turn it off if necessary. so --nounicode / -n?

octo · 2013-12-05T17:04:27Z

We're not using getopt_long for portability at the moment. I think a convention is to use upper case and lower case for boolean options, though not consistently: ssh -X enables X forwarding, -x disables it. ssh -t forces (enables) a TTY, -T prevents (disables) one … I'd prefer -u to mean "(force) use Unicode", -U to mean "disable Unicode" and neither to mean "automatically figure it out". Does that sound like a plan?

anarcat · 2013-12-05T17:13:39Z

sounds like a plan to me! now if we could only figure out how to auto-detect now ;)

This makes it much easier and cleaner to add a second, non-Unicode implementation and possibly even a non-color version.

octo · 2013-12-05T17:25:16Z

Also, I just pushed an update to the ab/prettyping branch of my repository which does some refactoring of the code into its own function. I'd be great if you could merge or pick that into the PR.

Thanks :)
—octo

anarcat · 2013-12-06T03:09:39Z

About unicode detection, what do we have?

stackexchange suggests locale charmap which returns UTF-8 here
rosettacode suggests (basically) grepping LANG for utf (case insensitive)
ncurses mailing list says you need to import the user's locale (LC_ALL) and deal with it from there
POSIX seems to say we should use:
```
#include <langinfo.h>
char const *codeset = nl_langinfo (CODESET);
```
then i guess we need to grep for utf there?

It's unclear what are the expectations (of ncurses?) here - do we expect a "unicode" or "utf-8" terminal? And if the locale is set, that's one thing, but it doesn't mean the terminal supports it.

But I guess we could assume that if the locale is set to unicode and the terminal doesn't support it, that's some serious foot-shooting from the user and failure is expected. That is my expectation is a unicode user anyways so far.

anarcat · 2013-12-06T03:27:15Z

Another note - from what I understand, ncurses itself relies on nl_getinfo() to detect the locale to display (say) unicode or borders properly. (I base this on the claim done by python.)

I am not sure what that means, but there you go. :)

anarcat · 2013-12-06T03:30:45Z

I added the refactoring in - one thing though: it seems now the code runs only if has_colors() - however, we could still display a (more limited) progressbar without colors, so I feel we should push that check further down the stack...

anarcat · 2013-12-06T04:04:41Z

Here's the unicode-detection code in ncurses:

/*
 * Check if we are running in a UTF-8 locale.
 */
NCURSES_EXPORT(int)
_nc_unicode_locale(void)
{
    int result = 0;
#if defined(__MINGW32__) && USE_WIDEC_SUPPORT
    result = 1;
#elif HAVE_LANGINFO_CODESET
    char *env = nl_langinfo(CODESET);
    result = !strcmp(env, "UTF-8");
    T(("_nc_unicode_locale(%s) ->%d", env, result));
#else
    char *env = _nc_get_locale();
    if (env != 0) {
    if (strstr(env, ".UTF-8") != 0) {
        result = 1;
        T(("_nc_unicode_locale(%s) ->%d", env, result));
    }
    }
#endif
    return result;
}

This function is used as such:

    sp->_screen_unicode = _nc_unicode_locale();

Maybe we can use that? the screen object doesn't seem accessible unfortunately...

this is fairly ugly - we use a hidden ncurses function to detect unicode (but at least we don't reimplement it), then we mess around with the character arrays to display the rights symbols i am not sure i like this, but i prefer to braindump than to stall, so let's move forward.

anarcat · 2013-12-06T04:51:17Z

alright, that commit (5901ec3) adds some crude autodetection magic (based on that hidden ncurses function, _nc_unicode_locale) and messes around with my rotten C brain to display the right thing.

we're just missing a commandline option now and we're good, although a second pair of eyes on that ugly mess I just pushed should be applied.

obligatory screenshot:

unset $LANG or $LC_ALL (or whatever env | grep -i utf tells you to) to test.

this will ease transition to a commandline option override

note that "forcing" may not work: ncurses still expects your locale to be correct, so maybe the force flag should also explicitely set a utf8 locale?

anarcat · 2013-12-06T05:17:42Z

done for the night. :)

…tion. The "-u" and "-U" options are now handled in a single variable so that the last option "wins".

anarcat · 2014-01-21T16:40:46Z

Alright, so we now have a commandline option, proper toolchain hooks, everything seems to be in order and I use this in production on a daily basis. In fact, I have had this code (65e6e0f, to be more precise) running for over 7 days straight over 6 targets now, so I'd say it works well. :)

Can we merge this in already? The debian package already picked it up as well: http://packages.qa.debian.org/libo/liboping/news/20131226T164825Z.html :)

anarcat · 2014-03-06T14:53:18Z

ping?

anarcat · 2014-03-19T20:40:49Z

ping

anarcat · 2014-06-04T02:59:04Z

can we get this show on the road? this is working now, i have ran the code in a test to multiple hosts until i rebooted my workstation, about a week ago - so basically 4 months, without a crash.

anarcat · 2014-08-07T22:35:35Z

ping

PierrePaul · 2014-08-08T15:41:16Z

Any updates on this?

octo · 2014-09-25T00:21:20Z

Sorry for losing track of this :\ I've just merged this to the master branch (4710e54) and will create a new liboping version soon now :)

Best regards,
—octo

anarcat · 2014-09-25T03:23:20Z

alas! thank you very much for this!

denilsonsa · 2015-10-25T04:34:31Z

In case someone looks at this pull request someday in the future and finds broken links to prettyping, it is because it has a new homepage: https://github.com/denilsonsa/prettyping and http://denilsonsa.github.io/prettyping/

anarcat added 10 commits December 2, 2013 20:46

put histograms into the independent window, to eventually restore pin…

d64c113

…g times display

restore usual ping display, now that histograms are in a different wi…

3603703

…ndow

make histogram colors with a nicer background

f379d7a

remove a little quirk i introduced by mistake

d5a3fc9

this was breaking the border

wrap around the window once the histogram grows too big

00c587b

cleanup safety checks

3885683

make sure that if we go beyond the max ratio, we just mark it as one

rework scaling algorithm so it covers the whole range

faa01e5

i did this after some stress testing, now it covers the whole range on input

better wrapping: add a cursor and respect inner borders

59786b9

switch to ncursesw in the build chain

317c34a

Refactor the graph printing into its own function.

ae1a4da

This makes it much easier and cleaner to add a second, non-Unicode implementation and possibly even a non-color version.

anarcat added 2 commits December 6, 2013 00:07

move unicode detection to a separate function

b59778b

this will ease transition to a commandline option override

add commandline flag for forcing or disabling unicode

32ec0e8

note that "forcing" may not work: ncurses still expects your locale to be correct, so maybe the force flag should also explicitely set a utf8 locale?

Florian Forster added 3 commits December 6, 2013 10:52

src/oping.h: Don't use the ncurses internal _nc_unicode_locale() func…

3ee0169

…tion. The "-u" and "-U" options are now handled in a single variable so that the last option "wins".

Add documentation for the "-u" and "-U" options.

65e6e0f

Add support for both, ncurses and ncursesw.

fd42a5b

schweikert mentioned this pull request May 27, 2014

ncurses / "prettyping" feature schweikert/fping#63

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octo closed this Sep 25, 2014

anarcat deleted the prettyping branch September 25, 2014 03:23

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implement some prettyping-inspired display alongside textual data. #3

implement some prettyping-inspired display alongside textual data. #3

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implement some prettyping-inspired display alongside textual data. #3

implement some prettyping-inspired display alongside textual data. #3

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