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Comment by xenophonf | Hacker News Reader

I really wish you wouldn't. All the rinky dink colors and animations screw with the CLI output when you don't correctly detect whether the user's running the app interactively.

Keep it plain text. Regular, old, boring output is good.

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I dislike when devs only try to detect if it’s a tty, then enable all their gimmicks without even providing a flag. Not everything is xterm-256color.

And not everything that calls itself xterm-256color is actually xterm compatible *cough* GNOME *cough*.

Xterm is actually a terminal emulator, and has to pass a suite of conformance tests that actually check its emulation of DEC VT series terminals.

Most of its successors are more like "shitty xterm emulators" whose conformance tests are "do my favorite mOdErN CLI apps work".

I agree. So many TUIs from webshit devs don't even bother to call isatty, let alone check terminfo to see if ANSI escape codes are even valid for this terminal.

But modern open source subscribes to Mao's Continuous Revolution Theory. Calls for some measure of stability and sanity are usually dismissed with some form of the argument "awwww, is poor diddums afwaid of a widdle change?" Or in this case, "still using vi on your ADM3A, old timer? Our software is not for you."

Emacs on a Link MC5, although something doesn't like how the terminal handles flow control. I'm not sure if it's the O/S, the UART, the cable, or the terminal, but I have issues with I/O corruption. Even something a simple as a directory listing will get messed up, and on both FreeBSD and Linux, so maybe that rules out the O/S. Oh well. I'll figure it out some day.

Yeah. "The only winning move is not to play".

Big blocks of text are difficult to parse

Not with sed and awk they aren't.

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