Re: OSC8 hyperlink support in ncurses

[G. Branden Robinson]

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

I offer that link mainly for the edification of bystanders; I trust
you've already read and considered that material.

>    (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.

> 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).

We'd like to be able to ask terminfo if the terminal description
supports OSC 8, but we can't.

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

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