Re: OSC8 hyperlink support in ncurses

[Thomas Dickey]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 03:21:43AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> At 2023-08-23T03:24:51-0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 01:12:04PM -0400, Dusty Mabe wrote:
> > > I'm wondering if anyone has ever requested OSC8 hyperlink support
> > > [1] in ncurses
> > 
> > This is probably the first mention on this list.
> > 
> > I don't see any use in my working on this, because:
> > 
> > a) it opens up a new set of security vulnerabilities
> 
> There was a humdinger of an argument about this on Egmont Koblinger's
> Gist about this feature.
> 
> https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda

sure - he's glib (odd, that I just noticed that pun).

But this is the developer responsible for the feature that caused
gnome-terminal to run out of memory while I ran an ncurses test-program.

See the end of this section:

https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-slang.html#compare_picsmap

(coincidentally, he fixed _that_ bug two weeks after I wrote that section)
 
> I offer that link mainly for the edification of bystanders; I trust
> you've already read and considered that material.

yes, I've had a few years to consider it.  Now that it's becoming more
prevalent, others are thinking about it as well.  It would be nice to
have the full presentation for this:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/09/ansi_escape_sequence_risks/

> >    (which if you read this list, and investigate, you'll notice that I
> >    do _all_ of the work to mitigate those issues).
> 
> Fair.
> 
> > b) doing this as you might expect will interfere with performance for
> >    _all_ applications.
> 
> Maybe some clever volunteer can think of an unexpected implementation
> that doesn't.

sure - someone with a lot of time :-)
 
> > The developer working on tmux is working through the latter, and
> > ignoring the former.  Perhaps in a few years, after both aspects are
> > resolved, he might want to adapt some of that to ncurses.
> 
> In the meantime it would be helpful if you could add a terminfo
> capability so that applications using terminfo but not curses per se can
> pay their money and take their chances, as with groff's grotty(1), for
> which Lennart Jablonka is preparing patches to make the program a
> terminfo application (at long last, one might say).

Nicolas has a feature for this which his users can configure :-)
 
> We'd like to be able to ask terminfo if the terminal description
> supports OSC 8, but we can't.

Actually, that's mostly due to Egmont's interference,
as you're probably aware.

> Meanwhile, my crystal ball says I'll be using gnome-terminal to check
> grotty's OSC 8 support for the foreseeable future--but only on occasion,
> as xterm is my daily driver and I have no plans to change that.
> 
> Regards,
> Branden



-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
https://invisible-island.net

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature