term-ng

TermNG (Next Generation)

Enables enhanced node.js/fish-shell/XTerm/iTerm3 feature integration.

• Senses 24bit colour (truecolor) when $TERM_COLOR=16m environment variable is set.
• Adds --color=16m to front of process.argv before wrapping the supports-color module.
• Indicate enhanced media support by setting:
  • $TERM_IMAGES=enabled : Allow rendering of inline images using OSC sequences.
  • $TERM_AUDIO=enabled : Allow enhanced audio.
• Indicate that you use a font that has box drawing or full extended characters.
  • $TERM_FONT=box : Terminal font has UTF8 box drawing characters.
  • $TERM_FONT=full : Terminal font has full UTF8 extras (such as Menlo, DejaVu Mono).
• Sense $TERM suffixes to indicate enhanced termcap capabilities.

In fish, it's a simple as defining a universal, exported variable.

	set -Ux TERM_IMAGES enabled
	set -Ux TERM_FONT full

In bash an export TERM_IMAGES=enabled in ~/.bashrc will do the trick. I don't use tcsh or zsh anymore so can't remember exactly which files are used when those shells are invoked interactively. Fish is almost always invoked interactively - which is kind of the point of fish, it being the 'Freindly INTERACTIVE Shell' after all! Write scripts for portablility (sh/bash/perl even node) then write fish functions to interact with those scripts from the keyboard... but I digress.

In some of my 'private' admin/control systems, I use a customised terminfo database that wraps some of the (very useful) enhanced OSC abilities of more recent iTerm builds into new commands available via tput (which I further wrap in fish functions).

The terminfo directory above contains iTerm.ti. Using /usr/bin/tic and ncurses' terminfo database (available from invisible-island.net), I build a new terminal type xterm-256color+iterm3, and change the Terminal type preference in iTerm to the same, setting the $TERM environment variable.

The new terminfo entries are built thusly...

cd term-ng/terminfo
curl http://invisible-island.net/datafiles/current/terminfo.src.gz
gunzip terminfo.src.gz
tic -xrs -e xterm-256color terminfo.src
tic -xsv3 iTerm.ti

This create a new, updated xterm-256color and then extends it for iTerm. this is non-destructive as it creates new entries at ~/.terminfo/. Simply delete this directory to return the terminfo databases back to the original OS provided state.

A word of caution... while this has worked very well for me, I have found that some things complain about an unrecognized term type - Homebrew is notable here. A simple workaround is to have a standard xterm-256color profile defined to use when brewing.

Terminal Color Test

From inside the package directory, running npm run-script colors will generate a preview of the entire color gamut your terminal is capable of. Output of a recent iTerm beta shown below: