Re: Unicode grapheme clusters

On Fri, 20 Jan 2023 at 00:07, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> I partially watch an progres in VTE - one of the widely used terminal libs, and I am very sceptical so there will be support in the next two years.
>
> Maybe the new microsoft terminal will give this area a new dynamic, but currently only few people on the planet are working on fixing or enhancing terminal's technologies. Unfortunately there is too much historical balast.

Fwiw this isn't really about terminal emulators. psql is also used to
generate text files for reports or for display in various ways.

I think it's worth using whatever APIs we have available to implement
better alignment for grapheme clusters and just assume whatever will
eventually be used to display the output will display it "properly".

I do not think it's worth trying to implement this ourselves if the
libraries aren't there yet. And I don't think it's worth trying to
adapt to the current state of the current terminal. We don't know that
that's the only place the output will be viewed and it'll all be
wasted effort when the terminals eventually implement full support.

(If we were really crazy about this we could use terminal escape codes
to query the current cursor position after emitting multicharacter
graphemes. But as I said, I don't even think that would be useful,
even if there weren't other reasons it would be a bad idea)

--
greg