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State of the Terminal
This is a companion article to my talk at Neovimconf 2023. I have been using Vim/Neovim as my full time text editor for close to 10 years. I’ve spent a lot of time in the terminal and have become very aware of the many flaws and idiosyncrasies of this bizarre platform. But I also think it gets a lot of things right! And I’m not alone in this belief: terminal based tools are still widely popular even in the presence of many alternatives (the StackOverflow developer survey shows that Neovim is the “most loved” editor 3 years in a row).
OSC sequences are those which begin with the prefix ESC ] and are typically used for things that modify or interact with the user’s environment outside of the terminal emulator itself (hence the name “Operating System Command”). Paul Evans (author of libvterm and libtickit) introduced an alternate key encoding using the CSI u escape sequence in an essay which is sometimes colloquially referred to as “fixterms”. These colors could be changed at runtime using an escape sequence (OSC 4), which can be used to great effect (see “8 Bit & ‘8 Bitish’ Graphics-Outside the Box” by Mark Ferrari for an incredible demonstration, or install notcurses and run notcurses-demo j in your terminal).
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