ASCII only mode

[ryanfelder]

I have a 1979 VT100 sitting on my desk. I set my terminal emulation to $TERM=vt100
Unfortunately, it seems the characters used for drawing the boxes in wtf are not supported by this encoding.

It would be great if I could define 7-bit or 8-bit only mode, such as I can often do with aa libs.

[senorprogrammer]

Whoa. Nice! This might be my favourite bug report/feature request I've ever received. No promises, but I'll definitely keep it in mind; just need to find my dad's old Osborne 1 first....

[AaronOmanLendesk]

@ryanfelder rocks! :-)

[senorprogrammer]

Closing this request because I'll never get around to looking into this. If someone opens a PR that adds this compatibility, I'll happily merge it in.

[ryanfelder]

Ouch, from 'favourite bug report/feature request' ever to 'won't fix' in 8 hours?

It seems like tcell supports converting between character sets natively, but I'm not a go programmer so a pull request is going to have a high barrier of entry for me.

"Internally Tcell uses UTF-8, just like Go. However, Tcell understands how to convert to and from other character sets, using the capabilities of the golang.org/x/text/encoding packages."
https://github.com/gdamore/tcell
https://github.com/gdamore/tcell/blob/master/encoding.go

It's your project so it's your call, but I doubt I'll be the last one to ask for ascii support on a text mode application.

[senorprogrammer]

All excellent points. I think I was too hasty. I'll reopen. Thanks for checking back in and doing the research, it's appreciated.

[ryanfelder]

Thank you very much!

This could be a much more useful screensaver than what I currently use.

[gdamore]

Tcell can do more of this, as it understands fallback characters as well, but the application needs to define fallbacks for unusual characters. (We should try to use the ALT character set if your terminal supports it, to get access to box drawing glyphs that way. The vt100 database does have entries for the ACS characters but I think only a few of them are present.)

In the Tcell package, the _demos/mouse.go program can be run with TERM set appropriately to check this. A real VT100 will get box characters. To compare what it looks like when you don't have that, try running with TERM=aixterm. (NOTE: You will have to set your locale via LC_ALL or somesuch to a 7 bit locale, e.g. "C".)

[rfeldercyc]

Turns out that by setting

export LC_ALL=C
export LC_CTYPE=C
export LANG=C

tcell's internal fallback seems to just work!

I think this issue can now be closed.

[senorprogrammer]

This is amazing, well done. I love it!