Hi Ken,
for example, man outputs "bold" text by doing overstriking with ^H and
less knows how to deal; I don't know if that was planned as much as it
is an artifact of history.
man (nroff) gets bold by overstriking because moving the teletype's head
back and putting down more ink is the best it could do. Later, some
terminals, the real kind, not xterm(1), could spot this and embolden
that cell's glyph. nroff has an \o escape to overstrike up to nine
characters, e.g. é is \o'e\''; that worked best on paper, obviously.
I just looked; ls, at least, hardcodes the ANSI sequence strings into
the code (hm, so does grep). I don't know if that's standard practice
or not; somehow doing that still sticks in my craw.
There is dircolors(1) to help set LS_COLORS for ls(1) to read, e.g.
`dircolors --print-database', but I agree with disliking hard-coding
ANSI escape sequences.
Cheers, Ralph.
_______________________________________________
Nmh-workers mailing list
Nmh-workers(_at_)nongnu(_dot_)org
https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers