Feature Request: Bold and italics terminal font

[mcastorina]

It would be nice to display text surrounded by * or _ as bold or italic in the buffer like in Slack.
e.g. *this text is bold* and _this text is italic_

[ToxicFrog]

Implemented in #338

[auscompgeek]

I'm not seeing italics.

[ToxicFrog]

IRC doesn't support italics (and neither do most terminal emulators); italics in slack get rendered as underlines in IRC, and vice versa.

[chreekat]

I'm not upset with the way things are, but my terminal (Gnome Terminal) does support italics, and I think it would be nice to keep the option open for the future.

[ToxicFrog]

It looks like weechat itself supports italics if the terminal and libcurses do, so I don't see any technical obstacles to this.

It shouldn't be hard to add a configuration setting to toggle between rendering italics as underline vs. as italics.

[chreekat]

Yeah, I was just trying it out -- weechat's /help trigger even lists the necessary trigger for bold/underline/italic as an example[1]. :) Unfortunately it wasn't immediately successful: it did the "use reverse in place of italics" hack that I've seen elsewhere and don't immediately recall how to fix...

[1]: Copied here:

/trigger add effects modifier weechat_print "${tg_tag_nick}" "==\*(\S+)\*==*${color:bold}${re:1}${color:-bold}*== ==_(\S+)_==_${color:underline}${re:1}${color:-underline}_== ==/(\S+)/==/${color:italic}${re:1}${color:-italic}/"

[mcastorina]

Bold and italic doesn't appear to be working: *_bold and italic_*

[ToxicFrog]

Testing: *_bold and italic_* renders as _bold and italic_ in bold, and _*italic and bold*_ renders as *italic and bold* in italic (well, underlined).

Looking at the code I would expect the former to work even if the latter doesn't.

[ToxicFrog]

If they aren't nested side by side it works, e.g. _italic and *bold* in the middle_ renders correctly.

[auscompgeek]

IRC doesn't support italics

IRC does have italics. weechat has the default keybind of C-c i to make text italics.

[ToxicFrog]

What does this turn into on the wire? Because most clients don't support it, and last time I saw someone try to use an italics-enabled client on IRC it sent ^I as the italics code, otherwise known as TAB, which didn't really work out so well.

[auscompgeek]

That's why everyone standardised on \x1D. I don't know of any maintained clients that don't support italics nowadays.

[ToxicFrog]

Huh. I don't think I've ever seen that in the wild, or if I did, it didn't work with the clients I was using (mostly hexchat and weechat).

At any rate, I'm working on a patch that should enable italic support for weeslack, but someone else will need to test it, because I don't have my tty set up for italic support.

[ToxicFrog]

Looks like this is going to add three new settings:

• render_bold_as controls how incoming *bold* is rendered
• render_italic_as controls how incoming _italic_ is rendered
• map_underline_to controls how outgoing underlines are rendered in slack

With default settings of bold, italic, and _ respectively.

[ToxicFrog]

See PR #350

[ToxicFrog]

PR/#350 adds italics support, and options to translate italics to underline for people whose terminals don't support italics.

I/#354 tracks issues with nested formatting characters.