Re: lynx-dev Any way to pass a literal ESC to the terminal?

[David Woolley]

> 
> I would like to be able to view a local text file which contains ANSI
> color escape codes, and have Lynx pass these codes to the terminal, which
> knows how to interpret them.  I thought that this should be possible

Use print to screen or print to a pager that explicitly knows about
colour control sequences.

> by setting the display charset to Transparent, and/or also setting the
> assumed document charset to x-transparent, but I haven't found a way to
> get it to work.  Any hints would be appreciated.

Transparent is for when real characters appear in the second control
character region etc.; it is not for letting through real control
characters.  Real control characters will confuse the library routine
that manages the screen image, as, at least on the original Lynx platforms,
that uses escape sequences itself and expects to know the effects on
layout of all sequences sent.  (A naive pass through would shorten lines
containing colour sequences, as it would treat the characters in the sequence
as actually taking positions on the screen.  This might break some cursor
positioning optimisations.)

Incidentally, ANSI terminal codes were never intended as an interchange
format, only for direct use in controlling a terminal.

Basically you need a special paging application if you want to treat
such files as being an interchange format.

Given that this sort of file is fast becoming obsolete as the result of
HTML, I wouldn't want Lynx to be bloated with such support.