6 ms·

Inspect ANSI control codes and escape sequences

115 points by webpro 1y ago

webpro 1y ago
Working with and debugging ANSI control codes and escape sequences can be a challenge. This free web-based tool helps to inspect the input, visualize colors and styling, and list control codes. By using a proper tokenizer and parser (not just regex hacks), it supports all sorts of control codes. The parser is open source and available too (find links in "about"). Type or paste text in the black text area, or try out the examples. Use the lookup table to filter & find specific codes. Feedback welcome, I’d love to know what’s confusing, missing, or especially useful.
- michaelmior 1y ago
  Very cool! Seems like this should be a Show HN post.
JdeBP 1y ago
The revealing shibboleth is when people call it "ANSI". (-: "ANSI" is what people call it when they are working from paltry and incomplete samizdat doco of how this stuff works, from Microsoft's old ANSI.SYS appendix to its MS-DOS user manual, to innumerable modern WWW sites all repeating received wisdom. The thing to remember is that the "E" in "ECMA" does not stand for "ANSI". * https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-35/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... * https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-48/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... * https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-T.416-199303-I https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-T.416-199303-I If you read ECMA-35, you'll find that there's actually a whole system to escape sequences and control sequences. As I pointed out last month, it's often the case that people who haven't read ECMA-35 don't realize that parameter characters can be more than digits, don't handle intermediate characters, and don't grasp how DEC's question mark and SCO's equals sign fit into the overall picture. People who haven't read ECMA-48 and traced its history don't realize that there's subtlety to missing parameters in control sequences. And people who haven't read ITU/IEC T.416 do what many of us did years ago and get 24-bit colour wrong. Twice over. * https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy/issues/105#issuecomment-2974687142 https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy/issues/105#issuecomment... Other common errors include missing out on all of the other 7-bit aliases for C1 characters. Or not realising that the ECMA-35/ECMA-48 syntax allows for any control sequence to have sub-parameters, not just SGR. Or using regular expressions and pattern matching instead of a state machine. Only a state machine truly handles the fact that in the real world terminals allowed, and enacted, various C0 and C1 control characters in the middle of control sequences, as well as had ways of cancelling or restarting control sequences mid-sequence. * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/ECMA48Decoder.cpp https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/ECMA48Decode... But it gets even worse for a real world control sequence decoder. In the real world, not only do terminals interpret the same control sequences, and their parameters, differently depending from whether the terminal is sending or receiving them; but several terminal emulators like the one in Interix, rxvt, the one built in to Linux, and even XTerm, send control sequences that not only break ECMA-35 but also conflict with received control sequences. So if one wants to be comprehensive and be cabable of decoding real data, one needs a switch to tell the program whether to decode the character stream as if it is being received by the terminal or as if it is being sent by the terminal. * https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/console-decode-ecma48.xml https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/console-decod... Microsoft Terminal tries to do things properly, which many modern terminal emulators and tools do not, and handles this with two distinct entire state machines, one for input and one for output. * https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/terminal/parser https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/terminal... I handled it with a few goto statements and a handful of flags. (-: * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/console-decode-ecma48.cpp#L454 https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/console-deco...
- blueflow 1y ago
  I think this rant is out-of-place here, type "\x1b[:<=>$t" and check for yourself. It parses correctly. You do learn about the allowed character ranges for CSI sequences from ECMA-48 only, not from the Microsoft docs, so i guess the author did their homework.
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    That tells me that you are writing from ignorance, as for starters that's a truly pathetic test that even misses one of the characters that I explicitly mentioned above, let alone thoroughly tests the full range that the specs define. I had an actual poke around the parser code, in contrast to your superficial experimentation. (-: One can, with knowledge, actually find the point where the only three unusual characters that you in fact tested are special cased.
    - blueflow 1y ago
      They are not special cased: https://github.com/webpro/ANSI.tools/blob/main/packages/parser/src/parsers/csi.ts#L12 The comment correctly identifies the 0x30-0x3f range as parameter bytes and the following as intermediate bytes. Both the range and the names for the bytes are matching ECMA-48 Chapter 5.4. But you seem to think that everyone except yourself is incompetent, are you trying to make up for something?
      - JdeBP 1y ago
        Of course they are. There's a file with all of the special cased constants in, named constants.ts. Your superficial test tested all three of the special cases in the PRIVATE_OPENERS array, which is what the parser.ts code actually checks. DEC's question mark, which is special cased yet further off on its own, is in reality another "private opener", too, and it isn't limited to DEC (e.g. XQTMODKEYS), and neither does DEC not use the other non-digit parameter characters (e.g. DECDA3). (There's a hypothesis that DEC's own state machine didn't care where these marker characters were, as it was a simple state machine that had to fit in ROM and probably just set a bitflag. A mistake that we're probably all still making is assuming that they only take effect when in the very first position.) STRING_OPENERS is another widespread special casing that people do, treating ESC plus a few characters as special rather than handling all of the 7-bit aliases for the C1 characters as the general case. You seem to think that people who share what the mistakes are and where they themselves have made these very mistakes over the years, to help other people not make them and so that the world continues to remember this hard-learned stuff, is somehow worthy of ad hominems, straw men, insults, and vilification right off the bat. That's a very poor show and you should be ashamed.
mnurzia 1y ago
Neat tool, I could see this being handy for debugging TUI tools. I noticed that it works with _escaped_ ESC characters ("\x1b", "\u001b", "\033") but it didn't recognize raw ESC characters that I had in my clipboard. It might be useful to support those (maybe highlight them similarly to how VS Code highlights whitespace characters). The characters show up as numbered unicode error glyphs (I'm on Firefox, if that helps)
- webpro 1y ago
  Thanks, this is great feedback. I'll see what I can do, stay tuned.
  - webpro 1y ago
    Raw input should be cool now (there's "raw" in the examples as well)
ryan-c 1y ago
This is really cool - I've been experimenting with terminal escape sequences recently, and they go deep. Thanks for sharing! Get in touch (email in profile) if you'd like to collaborate.
- webpro 1y ago
  Thanks! It's all open source (including the tokenizer/parser), so feel free come collaborate on GitHub.
SpaceL10n 1y ago
The things they don't prepare you for in school... I was working at my first job and we had a ColdFusion app that was displaying some data from the database. I get a ticket one day saying our search page would crash when searching for a very specific document. The other 1 million+ documents all loaded fine to our knowledge, so why this one? I was pretty junior back then and feeling mighty defeated as to why I couldn't figure it out. I debugged every single line and condition, trying to find some reason. After ruling out the code as a culprit, I took the data we were loading and placed it into Notepad++. Don't remember why exactly. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with explanation and lazily moving the text cursor left and right through the text, mostly out of boredom and despair. That's when I noticed that I had pressed the right arrow key in my keyboard and the text cursor position hadn't changed! I pressed it again and nothing. Again, nothin. It took eight key presses to move the text cursor from one letter in a word to the adjacent letter. I was utterly bamboozled. Why was the text cursor getting stuck in the middle of this word?! Shortly thereafter, I discovered "Show all hidden characters" setting in the menu. I toggled it and sure enough there were little black boxes with weird three letter strings in them. NUL, ESC, and others - right where my cursor was getting hung up. That was the day I learned about ANSI control characters and the importance of data sanitization.
- txdv 1y ago
  There are also zero-space width characters, yeah utf is a rabbit hole
  - webpro 1y ago
    Emojis and other unicode characters may or may not be rendered as a single-width character. I've been splitting hairs and strings. The tool currently counts any unicode character as a single-width one.
- wpm 1y ago
  Similarly, I once copied a shell script out of Slack and saw a bunch of red errors from my IDE when I pasted it in. The errors were on every line that had a new line on it. The error was "â: Command not found", despite there being no such character on the line. Pasted it into a hex editor, tracked down the bytes, and while I can't currently remember specifically what the encoding problem was, it was something to do with going between UTF-8 > ISO-8859 > UTF-8 again. I've since aliased `pbpaste | xxd` (macOS, linux has similar CLI tools for working with the clipboard depending on your distro/DE), because weird shit like this comes up more often than I'd care to admit. Last rabbit hole was discovering that in macOS 15, Apple changed one of the the "space" characters in the default Screenshot file names, but only if your Mac is set to use 12-hour time from a normal ASCII 0x20 space, to a Unicode 'U+202F NNBSP' "non-breaking space" between the time and AM/PM, which was causing S3 uploads to fail.
tronster 1y ago
This is a fantastic web util; bookmarked for the future. I wish I had this when I was making, [Dragon's Oven](https://tronster.itch.io/dragon https://tronster.itch.io/dragon). It was a lot of nights and weekends of tinkering with ANSI codes in Typescript. I learned a lot that surprised me, such as: most modern OS's still don't support 16m colors out of the box and that the default Linux shell doesn't support beyond 16 colors. Also no really good modern ANSI editors out there. I tried bringing back "TheDraw" in DosBOX for some art, but ended up using a mismatch of more modern utilities, false starting one of my own, and working on an image to ASCii/ANSI converter. Maybe it's growing up in the BBS days, but something about ANSI is really charming.
- prometheus76 1y ago
  TheDraw was a cornerstone of my teenage years. I would log into different BBSs just to see their ANSI welcome screens, then I would try and re-create them to learn the art. It was a unique form of animation and I was hoping you had figured out how to get TheDraw working. I also later used ANSI to make my own cool command line prompts in DOS and later, Linux.
  - ForOldHack 1y ago
    Recreate them? we would steal the stream, save it, run it through a hex editor, while watching it draw in a separate window. It got to be just a work of wonder what people came up with, and then my friend got an Amiga, and those splash screens... omg...
codesnik 1y ago
I wonder how many languages have nice looking "\e" for "\u001b". ruby, perl, bash, anything else?
112233 1y ago
"\u001b[0m — reset" ... what? Why SGR is not called by name, while, e.g. CUU is? strange... According to which terminal or standard it interperts sequences? Is this tool really helpful? It does look nice! But it does not help with the corneriest cases that would benefit from such tool the most.
- webpro 1y ago
  Got to start somewhere! Didn't see many examples to get inspired by either. Here's the full table: https://ansi.tools/lookup https://ansi.tools/lookup. This is my initial take on it. Please bring in the corneriest cases! It's open source so bug reports, RFCs and pull requests are most welcome.
  - 112233 1y ago
    This thing is made out of corner cases: https://www.invisible-island.net/vttest/ https://www.invisible-island.net/vttest/ I am sure capturing it's output will provide endless source of amusement and despair. There are sequences from real terminal (e.g. stuff documented at vt100.net), sequences from ECMA 48 and friends (most of it likely never implemented), and de-facto behaviour of different software. Infamous examples being original windows terminal, rxvt (ugh), linux co nsole, emacs terminal. Most vexing behaviour is background fill on newline, incorrect characters in terminal reports, broken scroll region, inability to write in bottom-right position etc. This project looks fun! But it leads to endless narrow abandoned places. Hopefully you will enjoy the experience!
  - wonger_ 1y ago
    Ghostty the terminal emulator has a cell inspector feature along these same lines
gwbas1c 1y ago
I was a teenager when BBS's were popular. I still sometimes think I would enjoy writing an ANSI parser.
- webpro 1y ago
  What would prevent you from starting? Could be fun :)
  - gwbas1c 1y ago
    Time: There's other nerd projects I'd like to do.
  - Xss3 1y ago
    Probably their free time budget
taviso 1y ago
I've used the tool sequin in the past to debug issues: https://github.com/charmbracelet/sequin https://github.com/charmbracelet/sequin It worked great for me, seems much easier to debug logs directly in the terminal.
- webpro 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing, haven't seen that one yet. Will see if I can borrow ideas from it.
teddyh 1y ago
No support for blinking text.
- webpro 1y ago
  The parser has, but not the HTML renderer indeed. Using a third-party lib for that currently, but noticed the limitations too. Might replace it with my own!
  - teddyh 1y ago
    Great! Next step: torturetest.vt
    - webpro 1y ago
      There is https://github.com/webpro/ANSI.tools/blob/main/packages/parser/test/tokenize-stress.test.ts https://github.com/webpro/ANSI.tools/blob/main/packages/pars... and others
      - teddyh 1y ago
        I was thinking of <http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/torturet.vt http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/torturet.vt>.
        webpro 1y ago
        The lexer and parser handled it perfectly first try. The HTML renderer had a few issues though, but it's being rendered reasonably well now. The torture test has been added to the package tests and to the website as an example.
    - ForOldHack 1y ago
      Does it crash the tester? https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/tctest.htm https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/tctest.htm
FlyingAvatar 1y ago
I would have loved this in 1993. Not that I don't now, but I would have had a real use for it then.
- webpro 1y ago
  At least I tried to make it look like a 1993 website
imran9m 1y ago
Nice. This is helpful for making jenkis ci output colorful!!

115 points by webpro 1y ago

Working with and debugging ANSI control codes and escape sequences can be a challenge. This free web-based tool helps to inspect the input, visualize colors and styling, and list control codes. By using a proper tokenizer and parser (not just regex hacks), it supports all sorts of control codes. The parser is open source and available too (find links in "about"). Type or paste text in the black text area, or try out the examples. Use the lookup table to filter & find specific codes. Feedback welcome, I’d love to know what’s confusing, missing, or especially useful.

michaelmior 1y ago
Very cool! Seems like this should be a Show HN post.

JdeBP 1y ago

The revealing shibboleth is when people call it "ANSI". (-: "ANSI" is what people call it when they are working from paltry and incomplete samizdat doco of how this stuff works, from Microsoft's old ANSI.SYS appendix to its MS-DOS user manual, to innumerable modern WWW sites all repeating received wisdom. The thing to remember is that the "E" in "ECMA" does not stand for "ANSI". * https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-35/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... * https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-48/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... * https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-T.416-199303-I https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-T.416-199303-I If you read ECMA-35, you'll find that there's actually a whole system to escape sequences and control sequences. As I pointed out last month, it's often the case that people who haven't read ECMA-35 don't realize that parameter characters can be more than digits, don't handle intermediate characters, and don't grasp how DEC's question mark and SCO's equals sign fit into the overall picture. People who haven't read ECMA-48 and traced its history don't realize that there's subtlety to missing parameters in control sequences. And people who haven't read ITU/IEC T.416 do what many of us did years ago and get 24-bit colour wrong. Twice over. * https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy/issues/105#issuecomment-2974687142 https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy/issues/105#issuecomment... Other common errors include missing out on all of the other 7-bit aliases for C1 characters. Or not realising that the ECMA-35/ECMA-48 syntax allows for any control sequence to have sub-parameters, not just SGR. Or using regular expressions and pattern matching instead of a state machine. Only a state machine truly handles the fact that in the real world terminals allowed, and enacted, various C0 and C1 control characters in the middle of control sequences, as well as had ways of cancelling or restarting control sequences mid-sequence. * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/ECMA48Decoder.cpp https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/ECMA48Decode... But it gets even worse for a real world control sequence decoder. In the real world, not only do terminals interpret the same control sequences, and their parameters, differently depending from whether the terminal is sending or receiving them; but several terminal emulators like the one in Interix, rxvt, the one built in to Linux, and even XTerm, send control sequences that not only break ECMA-35 but also conflict with received control sequences. So if one wants to be comprehensive and be cabable of decoding real data, one needs a switch to tell the program whether to decode the character stream as if it is being received by the terminal or as if it is being sent by the terminal. * https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/console-decode-ecma48.xml https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/console-decod... Microsoft Terminal tries to do things properly, which many modern terminal emulators and tools do not, and handles this with two distinct entire state machines, one for input and one for output. * https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/terminal/parser https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/tree/main/src/terminal... I handled it with a few goto statements and a handful of flags. (-: * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/console-decode-ecma48.cpp#L454 https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/console-deco...

blueflow 1y ago
I think this rant is out-of-place here, type "\x1b[:<=>$t" and check for yourself. It parses correctly. You do learn about the allowed character ranges for CSI sequences from ECMA-48 only, not from the Microsoft docs, so i guess the author did their homework.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  That tells me that you are writing from ignorance, as for starters that's a truly pathetic test that even misses one of the characters that I explicitly mentioned above, let alone thoroughly tests the full range that the specs define. I had an actual poke around the parser code, in contrast to your superficial experimentation. (-: One can, with knowledge, actually find the point where the only three unusual characters that you in fact tested are special cased.
  - blueflow 1y ago
    They are not special cased: https://github.com/webpro/ANSI.tools/blob/main/packages/parser/src/parsers/csi.ts#L12 The comment correctly identifies the 0x30-0x3f range as parameter bytes and the following as intermediate bytes. Both the range and the names for the bytes are matching ECMA-48 Chapter 5.4. But you seem to think that everyone except yourself is incompetent, are you trying to make up for something?
    - JdeBP 1y ago
      Of course they are. There's a file with all of the special cased constants in, named constants.ts. Your superficial test tested all three of the special cases in the PRIVATE_OPENERS array, which is what the parser.ts code actually checks. DEC's question mark, which is special cased yet further off on its own, is in reality another "private opener", too, and it isn't limited to DEC (e.g. XQTMODKEYS), and neither does DEC not use the other non-digit parameter characters (e.g. DECDA3). (There's a hypothesis that DEC's own state machine didn't care where these marker characters were, as it was a simple state machine that had to fit in ROM and probably just set a bitflag. A mistake that we're probably all still making is assuming that they only take effect when in the very first position.) STRING_OPENERS is another widespread special casing that people do, treating ESC plus a few characters as special rather than handling all of the 7-bit aliases for the C1 characters as the general case. You seem to think that people who share what the mistakes are and where they themselves have made these very mistakes over the years, to help other people not make them and so that the world continues to remember this hard-learned stuff, is somehow worthy of ad hominems, straw men, insults, and vilification right off the bat. That's a very poor show and you should be ashamed.

mnurzia 1y ago

Neat tool, I could see this being handy for debugging TUI tools. I noticed that it works with _escaped_ ESC characters ("\x1b", "\u001b", "\033") but it didn't recognize raw ESC characters that I had in my clipboard. It might be useful to support those (maybe highlight them similarly to how VS Code highlights whitespace characters). The characters show up as numbered unicode error glyphs (I'm on Firefox, if that helps)

webpro 1y ago
Thanks, this is great feedback. I'll see what I can do, stay tuned.
- webpro 1y ago
  Raw input should be cool now (there's "raw" in the examples as well)

ryan-c 1y ago

This is really cool - I've been experimenting with terminal escape sequences recently, and they go deep. Thanks for sharing! Get in touch (email in profile) if you'd like to collaborate.

webpro 1y ago
Thanks! It's all open source (including the tokenizer/parser), so feel free come collaborate on GitHub.

SpaceL10n 1y ago

The things they don't prepare you for in school... I was working at my first job and we had a ColdFusion app that was displaying some data from the database. I get a ticket one day saying our search page would crash when searching for a very specific document. The other 1 million+ documents all loaded fine to our knowledge, so why this one? I was pretty junior back then and feeling mighty defeated as to why I couldn't figure it out. I debugged every single line and condition, trying to find some reason. After ruling out the code as a culprit, I took the data we were loading and placed it into Notepad++. Don't remember why exactly. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with explanation and lazily moving the text cursor left and right through the text, mostly out of boredom and despair. That's when I noticed that I had pressed the right arrow key in my keyboard and the text cursor position hadn't changed! I pressed it again and nothing. Again, nothin. It took eight key presses to move the text cursor from one letter in a word to the adjacent letter. I was utterly bamboozled. Why was the text cursor getting stuck in the middle of this word?! Shortly thereafter, I discovered "Show all hidden characters" setting in the menu. I toggled it and sure enough there were little black boxes with weird three letter strings in them. NUL, ESC, and others - right where my cursor was getting hung up. That was the day I learned about ANSI control characters and the importance of data sanitization.

txdv 1y ago
There are also zero-space width characters, yeah utf is a rabbit hole
- webpro 1y ago
  Emojis and other unicode characters may or may not be rendered as a single-width character. I've been splitting hairs and strings. The tool currently counts any unicode character as a single-width one.
wpm 1y ago
Similarly, I once copied a shell script out of Slack and saw a bunch of red errors from my IDE when I pasted it in. The errors were on every line that had a new line on it. The error was "â: Command not found", despite there being no such character on the line. Pasted it into a hex editor, tracked down the bytes, and while I can't currently remember specifically what the encoding problem was, it was something to do with going between UTF-8 > ISO-8859 > UTF-8 again. I've since aliased `pbpaste | xxd` (macOS, linux has similar CLI tools for working with the clipboard depending on your distro/DE), because weird shit like this comes up more often than I'd care to admit. Last rabbit hole was discovering that in macOS 15, Apple changed one of the the "space" characters in the default Screenshot file names, but only if your Mac is set to use 12-hour time from a normal ASCII 0x20 space, to a Unicode 'U+202F NNBSP' "non-breaking space" between the time and AM/PM, which was causing S3 uploads to fail.

tronster 1y ago

This is a fantastic web util; bookmarked for the future. I wish I had this when I was making, [Dragon's Oven](https://tronster.itch.io/dragon https://tronster.itch.io/dragon). It was a lot of nights and weekends of tinkering with ANSI codes in Typescript. I learned a lot that surprised me, such as: most modern OS's still don't support 16m colors out of the box and that the default Linux shell doesn't support beyond 16 colors. Also no really good modern ANSI editors out there. I tried bringing back "TheDraw" in DosBOX for some art, but ended up using a mismatch of more modern utilities, false starting one of my own, and working on an image to ASCii/ANSI converter. Maybe it's growing up in the BBS days, but something about ANSI is really charming.

prometheus76 1y ago
TheDraw was a cornerstone of my teenage years. I would log into different BBSs just to see their ANSI welcome screens, then I would try and re-create them to learn the art. It was a unique form of animation and I was hoping you had figured out how to get TheDraw working. I also later used ANSI to make my own cool command line prompts in DOS and later, Linux.
- ForOldHack 1y ago
  Recreate them? we would steal the stream, save it, run it through a hex editor, while watching it draw in a separate window. It got to be just a work of wonder what people came up with, and then my friend got an Amiga, and those splash screens... omg...

codesnik 1y ago

I wonder how many languages have nice looking "\e" for "\u001b". ruby, perl, bash, anything else?

112233 1y ago

"\u001b[0m — reset" ... what? Why SGR is not called by name, while, e.g. CUU is? strange... According to which terminal or standard it interperts sequences? Is this tool really helpful? It does look nice! But it does not help with the corneriest cases that would benefit from such tool the most.

webpro 1y ago
Got to start somewhere! Didn't see many examples to get inspired by either. Here's the full table: https://ansi.tools/lookup https://ansi.tools/lookup. This is my initial take on it. Please bring in the corneriest cases! It's open source so bug reports, RFCs and pull requests are most welcome.
- 112233 1y ago
  This thing is made out of corner cases: https://www.invisible-island.net/vttest/ https://www.invisible-island.net/vttest/ I am sure capturing it's output will provide endless source of amusement and despair. There are sequences from real terminal (e.g. stuff documented at vt100.net), sequences from ECMA 48 and friends (most of it likely never implemented), and de-facto behaviour of different software. Infamous examples being original windows terminal, rxvt (ugh), linux co nsole, emacs terminal. Most vexing behaviour is background fill on newline, incorrect characters in terminal reports, broken scroll region, inability to write in bottom-right position etc. This project looks fun! But it leads to endless narrow abandoned places. Hopefully you will enjoy the experience!
- wonger_ 1y ago
  Ghostty the terminal emulator has a cell inspector feature along these same lines

gwbas1c 1y ago

I was a teenager when BBS's were popular. I still sometimes think I would enjoy writing an ANSI parser.

webpro 1y ago
What would prevent you from starting? Could be fun :)
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  Time: There's other nerd projects I'd like to do.
- Xss3 1y ago
  Probably their free time budget

taviso 1y ago

I've used the tool sequin in the past to debug issues: https://github.com/charmbracelet/sequin https://github.com/charmbracelet/sequin It worked great for me, seems much easier to debug logs directly in the terminal.

webpro 1y ago
Thanks for sharing, haven't seen that one yet. Will see if I can borrow ideas from it.

teddyh 1y ago

No support for blinking text.

webpro 1y ago
The parser has, but not the HTML renderer indeed. Using a third-party lib for that currently, but noticed the limitations too. Might replace it with my own!
- teddyh 1y ago
  Great! Next step: torturetest.vt
  - webpro 1y ago
    There is https://github.com/webpro/ANSI.tools/blob/main/packages/parser/test/tokenize-stress.test.ts https://github.com/webpro/ANSI.tools/blob/main/packages/pars... and others
    - teddyh 1y ago
      I was thinking of <http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/torturet.vt http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/torturet.vt>.
      - webpro 1y ago
        The lexer and parser handled it perfectly first try. The HTML renderer had a few issues though, but it's being rendered reasonably well now. The torture test has been added to the package tests and to the website as an example.
  - ForOldHack 1y ago
    Does it crash the tester? https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/tctest.htm https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/tctest.htm

FlyingAvatar 1y ago

I would have loved this in 1993. Not that I don't now, but I would have had a real use for it then.

webpro 1y ago
At least I tried to make it look like a 1993 website

imran9m 1y ago

Nice. This is helpful for making jenkis ci output colorful!!