Re: Italic text with screen inside urxvt and some termcap questions

[Micah Cowan]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Kazuo Teramoto wrote:
> Hello, sometime ago (in 2006) someone asked if is possible to print
> italic text when using screen inside urxvt, but it received no
> replies...
> 
> Someone know if it is possible? I tried some things with termcap (but
> to be sincere I don't fully understand the concept of
> termcaps/terminfo) like adding the following line to screenrc:
> 
>   termcapinfo rxvt* so=:se= ZH=\E[3m:ZR=\E[m
> 
> My idea is that i needed to remove the definition of standout and put
> the italic in the place of \E[3m. But that don't works (well i think
> that is not supposed to work, but as I sad i dont fully understand
> what the termcap is all about)... In urxvt, outside of screen, the
> string '\33[3mHello\33[m' prints hello in italic.
> 
> In the screen manual 'Standout' have a '(ANSI: Italicized)' what is
> that is supposed to mean?

It means that what Screen uses for standout mode, ANSI (and rxvt) uses
for italics mode. I don't know why this is the case, but the fact that
it is means that making screen support italics would be a PITA.

If we make screen use \033[3m for italics (instead of its current use
for standout), and \033[7m for standout (ANSI's "negative image"), then
all pre-existing termcap/terminfo definitions for screen will be wrong,
and users will have to be especially careful not to use newer versions
of screen with older termcap/terminfo definitions for screen.

Nevertheless, it seems like it might not be a terrible idea to start
migration, or at least support a configuration option for it. I don't
know when such a change might be effected, though.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
GNU Maintainer: wget, screen, teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFI2AmQ7M8hyUobTrERAtIiAKCFfoYYtSKss4YFaImxxDV0bQqDdgCfZ95g
K/sIU1J3e8XZgcRuA3GdLd8=
=snpb
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----