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Comment by maficious | Hacker News Reader

Refterm is a not a full-featured terminal in terms of configurability, but it has all the features needed for rendering. Configuration like: choosing fonts, choosing colors, tabs, whatever, it's misc. features, which are unrelated to rendering. The case here is about rendering and it's exactly what is shite in every terminal emulator. I don't understand why everyone is arguing about it anyway. Refterm provides a fix, Windows Terminal should simply implement it. Is this dignity or what? Are you not engineers? Should you not prioritise software quality above everything else?

EDIT: Remove argument about ease of development, because refterm is easy.

This bugs me every time. "Wow, this software works so good, but we are not gonna make our software like that, no, we'll stick to our shite implementation."

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The fact that Casey Muratori's proposed approach requires the terminal to reimplement the process of correctly mapping characters to glyphs - including stuff like fallbacks to other fonts - is a huge part of the argument for why it's much harder to implement and more complicated than he claims. If it really doesn't do that right for something as simple as a decimal seperator for the font some random HN commenter happened to use, that does tend to suggest the Microsoft employees are in the right here.

The "font some random HN commenter happened to use" is some f****** proportional Calibri. I want to see someone use it in any terminal emulator. Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code, but, fair enough, it doesn't have fallback yet.

Its' description says also: "Reference monospace terminal renderer". "monospace" is there for a reason.

It's worth mentioning though, that Windows Terminal also defaults to Cascadia Code and Cascadia Code was installed automatically on my machine, so it's de-facto the new monospace standard font on Windows starting from 10.

> some f*** proportional Calibri Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code

cascadia is as borken as the other font, so what now?

https://i.imgur.com/WeV8Ror.png

maybe writing a unicode rendering isn't that easy? maybe drop the attitude?

Turned out it defaults to Cascadia Mono, my bad. Still your argument is wrong, because, like it doesn't work on your machine, on mine it does.

which is exactly the point, the amount of shortcut taken to convert code point to fast graphics make it just a nice hack thrown together and devs were right on preferring the slow but correct approach.

That is a terminal bug and not a rendering bug though, since the problem was that the terminal didn't properly fetch your user settings here. Feeding the same character into the other rendering would cause the same issue.

Nobody said he made a fully functional better terminal, just that the terminal rendering was better and functional. Doing everything needed for a fully functional terminal is a lot of work, but doing everything needed for terminal rendering isn't all that much work.

> Nobody said he made a fully functional better terminal

> The "complaining developer" produced a proof of concept in just two weekends that notably had more features[1] and was more correct than the Windows Terminal!

easily falsifiable bullshit found to be false.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28744084

I have to say though, the responder to the first comment did a bad job at conveying what exactly refterm is... Apparently people falsely think that refterm is a terminal emulator and use it interchangeably with terminal and terminal renderer, while it isn't.

If you were to open refterm once, you'd see a text that explicitly states "DO NOT USE IT AS A TERMNIAL EMULATOR", or something like that (can't open it now to copy exact).

>maybe drop the attitude?

You came here with an attitude.

> I just launched "dir" https://i.imgur.com/lkbOR3i.png can't even print properly the decimal separator. maybe it wasn't that easy.

You can’t use a non-monospace font on a tiled space. Like that literally makes no sense. Of course it won’t look right. This is like asking why you can’t use `out` parameters on an inherent async function.

Then again, refterm doesn't f*ck it up. It still renders proportional font; just aligned to tiles. It is essentially doing the same as for emoji.

Whether the font is monospace or not isn't really the problem - that causes some aesthetically ugly spacing, but that's to be expected and it's still readable. The big issue is that the code has completely failed to find a glyph for one of the characters used in something as commonplace as a directory listing from the dir command and people expect better than this from font rendering in modern applications.

If you copy and paste, the characters are there. The problem is that the glyph simply is off the tile.

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