[kwlug-disc] Curling This Website Was a Mistake, but you *should* do it anyway (+ Ghost TTY)

[Chris Irwin]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2026 at 02:04:06PM -0700, Ron wrote:
>
>What a fascinating deep-dive into ANSI control codes, as Dave always does.
>
>He leans on the GhostTTY documentation - which is better than I think 
>I've ever seen anywhere else on ANSI codes.

That's actually some helpful docs. I was just recently changing my 
prompt to turn red if the previous command had a failure status.

I was having a really weird problem where everything "worked", except 
long command word-wrapped wrong. Apparently I wasn't closing my escape 
sequences, and while that's not required for the colours to actually 
work, it was required for bash (or readline?) to understand how many of 
those characters were actually non-printable.

Those docs would have probably helped.

>Anyone use GhostTTY?  How do you like it?  Looks like it has GPU 
>accelerated graphics. In a terminal. Cool!

Haven't used it. I may check out for work. Since being migrated to 
Windows, I've been stuck using Windows Terminal. A good alternative 
would be nice.

I *have* had scenarios where the text-rendering pipeline can slow down 
output-heavy processes (I benchmarked something years ago and it was 
faster in xterm than gnome-terminal, mostly due to gnome-terminal 
supporting more advanced font rendering). So GPU-acceleration for a 
terminal isn't so crazy sounding (though I usually run that stuff in 
screen and detach, anyway)

On real computers, I've been using gnome-terminal for 25 years until 
this very week, having just switched to "Ptyxis". Apparently it's 
designed to work well with containers (whatever that means), but it also 
works just fine as a normal terminal.

Main reason I switched is because it resolves a long-standing issue I've 
had with gnome-terminal. About 15 years ago, it switched to a "factory" 
model, which wants to spawn all terminals from a single parent. Over 
time, I've had to do various workarounds to allow a terminal to not be 
owned by that parent, and my latest workaround has recently broken 
again.

Specifically, the ability to run a terminal with a separate 
app-id/.desktop file, so I can alt-tab directly to mutt. It's a 
command-line arg with Ptyxis.

I wrote about it here (sorry for the blogspam):

     https://chrisirwin.ca/posts/alt-tab-with-ptyxis/


-- 
Chris Irwin

email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
   web: https://chrisirwin.ca