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.

Usage

  const termNG = require('term-ng')

  // returns an object:
  
  // Color support
  termNG.color.hasBasic // Boolean - is there basic color support.
  termNG.color.level    // Integer - 0 = None, 1 = Basic, 2 = 256 colors, 3 = 24 bit color
  termNG.color.has256   // Boolean - terminal supports 256 colors
  termNG.color.has16m   // Boolean - terminal supports 16 million (24 bit) color

  // Images support
  termNG.images // Boolean - Does the terminal support inline images
                // env TERM_IMAGES=enabled to set 

  // Audio support
  termNG.audio // Boolean - Should the terminal support audio playback?
               // env TERM_AUDIO=enabled to set
  
  // Font support
  termNG.font.basic    // Boolean - font has basic box drawing symbols
  termNG.font.enhanced // Boolean - font has 'full' Unicode character support
                       // env TERM_FONT=[box|full] to set

  // Termcap support
  termNG.termcap.basic    // Boolean - using the default termcap
  termNG.termcap.enhanced // Boolean - using an enhanced/custom termcap
                          // env TERM_ENHANCED=enabled to override

  // Terminal software
  termNG.software // String - name of running terminal software, i.e. 'iTerm.app'

Notes on enhancing termcap

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: