Re: OSC8 hyperlink support in ncurses

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Thomas,

At 2023-08-23T15:25:24-0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 23, 2023 at 03:21:43AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > There was a humdinger of an argument about this on Egmont Koblinger's
> > Gist about this feature.
> > 
> > https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda
[...]
> 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

Ah, ha.  Yes, you've had that story up for a long time--I remember
reading it, but having no idea of the principals behind
the...entertainment.

> (coincidentally, he fixed _that_ bug two weeks after I wrote that
> section)

We take bug reports as we find them.  :P

> > 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/

Yes.  This is the sort of thing Ingo was alluding to.  I went off on my
own rant about it on the groff list.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-08/msg00106.html

If OSC 8 fails--even if hyperlinks in terminal windows are discarded as
a pointless fad--I will still be glad I added the `MR` macro to groff
for the three other reasons I did so.

(groff) NEWS:
  Inclusion of the `MR` macro was prompted by its introduction to
  Plan 9 from User Space's troff in August 2020.  Its purpose is to
  ameliorate several long-standing problems with man page cross
  references: (1) the package's lack of inherent hyperlink support for
  them; (2) false-positive identification of strings resembling man page
  cross references (as can happen with "exit(1)", "while(1)",
  "sleep(5)", "time(0)" and others) by terminal emulators and other
  programs; (3) the unwanted intrusion of hyphens into man page topics,
  which frustrates copy-and-paste operations (this problem has always
  been avoidable through use of the \% escape sequence, but cross
  references are frequent in man pages and some page authors are
  inexpert *roff users); and (4) deep divisions in man page maintenance
  communities over which typeface should be used to set the man page
  topic (italics, roman, or bold).

> > 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 :-)

I take it you mean that the `Hls` capability that tmux recognizes, we
could similarly handle via the user_caps(5) approach?

> > 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.

I actually am not.  But I am always interested to hear stories that can
inform my expectations of who will be fruitful to work with--or won't.

That goes for plagiarists, too.  I appreciate your pages documenting
your encounters with them.

Regards,
Branden

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