FYI: New APIs in VTE 0.52

[Egmont Koblinger]

FYI: VTE 0.52 (to be released in March 2018) adds 3 new functionalities and their corresponding APIs (already present in git). It's up to you whether you want to hook up and make config options for them.

Hopefully Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 LTS is going to ship VTE 0.52. If you care about this distro and would like your app to offer these features in this long term support release, you should probably release a new version of your app in time which (conditionally to this VTE version) enables these features.

- vte_terminal_{get,set}_cell_{height,width}_scale: Increased line spacing and character spacing mostly for accessibility for people with imperfect sight.

- vte_terminal_{get,set}_bold_is_bright: Whether escape sequences such as \e[1;35m switch to bright colors in addition to bold (legacy behavior) or switch to bold and leave the color intact (new behavior, required for solarized, base16 and similar modern color schemes). (And while at it, we've removed "Allow bold text" from gnome-terminal's UI, and will probably start deprecating its API in about a year. I see no sane reason for this option to exist.)

- vte_terminal_{get,set}_text_blink_mode: VTE now implements blinking text (\e[5m) and enables it by default, this option lets you disable it or make it conditional to the terminal being (un)focused.

Please refer to VTE's source tree for details, e.g. compile with --enable-gtk-doc and check the generated docs under doc/reference/html/index.html.

[Marcin Konarski (marcin-konarski+u1)]

> vte_terminal_{get,set}_bold_is_bright: Whether escape sequences such as \e[1;35m switch to bright colors in addition to bold (legacy behavior) or switch to bold and leave the color intact (new behavior, required for solarized, base16 and similar modern color schemes). (And while at it, we've removed "Allow bold text" from gnome-terminal's UI, and will probably start deprecating its API in about a year. I see no sane reason for this option to exist.)

What does it mean?
Does it mean that in the future there will be no way to disable bold text while keeping bright text?

Thank you for clarifying this up.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

> Does it mean that in the future there will be no way to disable bold text while keeping bright text?

Not at all, quite the opposite!

The goal is to separate the color from the boldness, have one no influence on the other and vice versa, so that every combination is clearly reachable.

The new value of this new API setting reaches this goal. This is not the default yet, it'll probably take many years (if at all) until we can switch the default to this, and probably many more years (if at all) until we can remove the legacy (current default) behavior where boldness also implies brighter colors.

See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=762247 (esp. comments 1 & 14) for details.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

FYI: vte-0.56 / gnome-terminal 3.32 (March 2019) will flip the default of "bold is bright" to false. That is, unless you add a config option or a hardwired call to re-enable it, terminator users will see a somewhat different (more logical, but maybe a bit unusual) behavior.

[Shane Heroux (ja2ui0)]

Is there a way to enable 'bold is bright' in terminator right now? A config option either for terminator or vte?