Right now syscons(4) uses a cons25-style terminal emulator. The
disadvantages of that are:
- Little compatibility with embedded devices with serial interfaces.
- Bad bandwidth efficiency, mainly because of the lack of scrolling
regions.
- A very hard transition path to support for modern character sets like
UTF-8.
Our terminal emulation library, libteken, has been supporting
xterm-style terminal emulation for months, so flip the switch and make
everyone use an xterm-style console driver.
I still have to enable this on i386. Right now pc98 and i386 share the
same /etc/ttys file. I'm not going to switch pc98, because it uses its
own Kanji-capable cons25 emulator.
IMPORTANT: What to do if things go wrong (i.e. graphical artifacts):
- Run the application inside script(1), try to reduce the problem and
send me the log file.
- In the mean time, you can run `vidcontrol -T cons25' and `export
TERM=cons25' so you can run applications the same way you did before.
You can also build your kernel with `options TEKEN_CONS25' to make all
virtual terminals use the cons25 emulator by default.
Discussed on: current@
xterm and cons25 have some incompatibilities when it comes to escape
sequences for special keys, such as F1 to F12, home, end, etc. Add a new
te_fkeystr() that can be used to override the strings.
scterm-sck won't do anything with this, but scterm-teken will use
teken_get_sequences() to obtain the proper sequence.
Right now if applications want to use the mouse on the command line,
they use sysmouse(4) and install a signal handler in the kernel to
deliver signals when mouse events arrive. This conflicts with my plan to
change to TERM=xterm, so implement proper VT200-style mouse input.
Because mouse input is now streamed through the TTY, it means you can
now SSH to another system on the console and use the mouse there as
well. The disadvantage of the VT200 mouse protocol, is that it doesn't
seem to generate events when moving the cursor. Only when pressing and
releasing mouse buttons.
There are different protocols as well, but this one seems to be most
commonly supported.
Reported by: Paul B. Mahol <onemda gmail com>
Tested with: vim(1)
It is quite inconvenient that if an application for xterm uses 256 color
mode, text suddenly starts to blink (because of ;5; in the middle).
We'd better just implement 256 color mode and add a conversion routine
from 256 to 8 color mode, which doesn't seem to be too bad in practice.
Remapping colors is done quite simple. If one of the channels is most
actively represented, primary colors are used. If two channels are most
actively represented, secondary colors are used. If all three channels
are equal (gray), it picks between black and white.
Reported by: Paul B. Mahol <onemda gmail com>
For some vague reason, it may be possible that scp->cursor_pos exceeds
scp->ysize * scp->xsize. This means that teken_set_cursor() may get
called with an invalid position. Just ignore the old cursor position in
this case.
Reported by: Paul B. Mahol <onemda gmail com>
MFC after: 1 month
Right now libteken processes TF_REVERSE internally and returns the
toggled colors to the console driver. This isn't entirely correct. This
means that the bold flag is always processed by the foreground color,
while reversing should be done after the foreground color has been set
to a brighter version by the bold flag.
This is no problem with the syscons driver, because with VGA it only
supports 16 foreground and 8 background colors. My WIP console driver
reconfigures the graphics hardware to disable the blink functionality
and uses 16 foreground and 16 background colors. This means that this
driver will handle the TF_REVERSE flag a little different from what
syscons does right now.
I initially committed libteken to sys/dev/syscons/teken, but now that
I'm working on a console driver myself, I noticed this was not a good
decision. Move it to sys/teken to make it easier for other drivers to
use a terminal emulator.
Also list teken.c in sys/conf/files, instead of listing it in all the
files.arch files separately.
Characters between 0x07 and 0x0d are now also mapped, which means we can
display almost 256 different characters. Also remap certain types of
dashes and quotes, which means we can finally read our manual pages
without red question marks in them.
Submitted by: Christoph Mallon
Add a small Unicode-to-CP437 remapping table to at least demonstrate
that the terminal emulator is perfectly capable of handling UTF-8. This
will of course break if the user loads a different font map, but it at
least allows people to give it a try.
I can now see the box drawing in dialog(1) and the arrows in mutt(1)
correctly.
Because we only support a single argument to tf_param, use 16 bits for
the pitch and 16 bits for the duration. While there, make the argument
unsigned. There isn't a single param call that needs a signed integer.
Submitted by: danfe (modified)
After I imported libteken into the source tree, I noticed syscons didn't
store the cursor position inside the terminal emulator, but inside the
virtual terminal stat. This is not very useful, because when you
implement more complex forms of line wrapping, you need to keep track of
more state than just the cursor position.
Because the kernel messages didn't share the same terminal emulator as
ttyv0, this caused a lot of strange things, like kernel messages being
misplaced and a missing notification to resize the terminal emulator for
kernel messages never to be resized when using vidcontrol.
This patch just removes kernel_console_ts and adds a special parameter
to te_puts to determine whether messages should be printed using regular
colors or the ones for kernel messages.
Reported by: ache
Tested by: nyan, garga (older version)
Some time ago I started working on a library called libteken, which is
terminal emulator. It does not buffer any screen contents, but only
keeps terminal state, such as cursor position, attributes, etc. It
should implement all escape sequences that are implemented by the
cons25 terminal emulator, but also a fair amount of sequences that are
present in VT100 and xterm.
A lot of random notes, which could be of interest to users/developers:
- Even though I'm leaving the terminal type set to `cons25', users can
do experiments with placing `xterm-color' in /etc/ttys. Because we
only implement a subset of features of xterm, this may cause
artifacts. We should consider extending libteken, because in my
opinion xterm is the way to go. Some missing features:
- Keypad application mode (DECKPAM)
- Character sets (SCS)
- libteken is filled with a fair amount of assertions, but unfortunately
we cannot go into the debugger anymore if we fail them. I've done
development of this library almost entirely in userspace. In
sys/dev/syscons/teken there are two applications that can be helpful
when debugging the code:
- teken_demo: a terminal emulator that can be started from a regular
xterm that emulates a terminal using libteken. This application can
be very useful to debug any rendering issues.
- teken_stress: a stress testing application that emulates random
terminal output. libteken has literally survived multiple terabytes
of random input.
- libteken also includes support for UTF-8, but unfortunately our input
layer and font renderer don't support this. If users want to
experiment with UTF-8 support, they can enable `TEKEN_UTF8' in
teken.h. If you recompile your kernel or the teken_demo application,
you can hold some nice experiments.
- I've left PC98 the way it is right now. The PC98 platform has a custom
syscons renderer, which supports some form of localised input. Maybe
we should port PC98 to libteken by the time syscons supports UTF-8?
- I've removed the `dumb' terminal emulator. It has been broken for
years. It hasn't survived the `struct proc' -> `struct thread'
conversion.
- To prevent confusion among people that want to hack on libteken:
unlike syscons, the state machines that parse the escape sequences are
machine generated. This means that if you want to add new escape
sequences, you have to add an entry to the `sequences' file. This will
cause new entries to be added to `teken_state.h'.
- Any rendering artifacts that didn't occur prior to this commit are by
accident. They should be reported to me, so I can fix them.
Discussed on: current@, hackers@
Discussed with: philip (at 25C3)
