Terminal color manipulation macros.
Copyright (C) 2005-2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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Select Graphic Rendition (SGR, "\33[...m") strings.
Also Erase in Line (EL) to Right ("\33[K") by default. Why have EL to Right after SGR?
-- The behavior of line-wrapping when at the bottom of the
terminal screen and at the end of the current line is often
such that a new line is introduced, entirely cleared with
the current background color which may be different from the
default one (see the boolean back_color_erase terminfo(5)
capability), thus scrolling the display by one line.
The end of this new line will stay in this background color
even after reverting to the default background color with
"\33[m', unless it is explicitly cleared again with "\33[K"
(which is the behavior the user would instinctively expect
from the whole thing). There may be some unavoidable
background-color flicker at the end of this new line because
of this (when timing with the monitor's redraw is just right).
-- The behavior of HT (tab, "\t") is usually the same as that of
Cursor Forward Tabulation (CHT) with a default parameter
of 1 ("\33[I"), i.e., it performs pure movement to the next
tab stop, without any clearing of either content or screen
attributes (including background color); try
printf 'asdfqwerzxcv\rASDF\tZXCV\n'
in a bash(1) shell to demonstrate this. This is not what the
user would instinctively expect of HT (but is ok for CHT).
The instinctive behavior would include clearing the terminal
cells that are skipped over by HT with blank cells in the
current screen attributes, including background color;
the boolean dest_tabs_magic_smso terminfo(5) capability
indicates this saner behavior for HT, but only some rare
terminals have it (although it also indicates a special
glitch with standout mode in the Teleray terminal for which
it was initially introduced). The remedy is to add "\33K"
after each SGR sequence, be it START (to fix the behavior
of any HT after that before another SGR) or END (to fix the
behavior of an HT in default background color that would
follow a line-wrapping at the bottom of the screen in another
background color, and to complement doing it after START).
Piping GCC's output through a pager such as less(1) avoids
any HT problems since the pager performs tab expansion.
Generic disadvantages of this remedy are:
-- Some very rare terminals might support SGR but not EL (nobody
will use "gcc -fdiagnostics-color" on a terminal that does not
support SGR in the first place).
-- Having these extra control sequences might somewhat complicate
the task of any program trying to parse "gcc -fdiagnostics-color"
output in order to extract structuring information from it.
A specific disadvantage to doing it after SGR START is:
-- Even more possible background color flicker (when timing
with the monitor's redraw is just right), even when not at the
bottom of the screen.
There are no additional disadvantages specific to doing it after
SGR END.
It would be impractical for GCC to become a full-fledged
terminal program linked against ncurses or the like, so it will
not detect terminfo(5) capabilities.
Referenced by output_line_beginning().
