CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cterminal
adsf
adsf

Reputation: 59

Is ANSI standard and portable for terminals?

I have a program in C where I want to draw colors and move cursors, etc. in the terminal. Currently, I am just using ANSI escape codes to do this. Is ANSI the most modern and most popular/used standard? Is it portable? Will more or fewer terminals support ANSI in the future?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 721

Answers (3)

Art C.
Art C.

Reputation: 1

Legacy terminals exist, but try getting by on one these days. I own several of them. Inevitably you end up running screen or some other program that turns it into an ANSI-compatible terminal from the running program's perspective.

Yes, it is safe to assume in 2023 that all terminals are somewhat reasonably ANSI compliant. If you're writing something like a text editor where you are really driving the terminal hard you might have trouble with the subtle differences between implementations, and in that case something like ncurses might help, but if you just want to use bold and italic and color and clear the screen and things like that, then go for it -- just use the ANSI codes directly.

Upvotes: 0

bazza
bazza

Reputation: 8434

I'd say that ANSI is going to be pretty reliably portable for some time to come.

However, it's possibly more productive and more protected from changes in underlying standards (e.g. a resurgence of PC3270) to use a library. There's an enormous list of them here, under the Libraries section. Ncurses seems to be something of a staple, and notcurses has a lot of merit too.

Upvotes: 1

Dúthomhas
Dúthomhas

Reputation: 10103

Modern terminal emulators (just about anything normal people will encounter these days) all tend to use stuff you can find documented in two places:

Microsoft’s “Console Virtual Terminal Sequences”

Thomas Dickey’s “XTerm Control Sequences”

It doesn’t get more authoritative than that.

Upvotes: 2

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