Pangoterm - coloured icons

Lately I've been working more on pangoterm again. A few days ago I was feeling oddly artistic, and decided to draw an icon for it, to distinguish it in window lists, etc..

I use a variety of differently-coloured terminals to represent different scenarios (mostly SSH terminals, picking colours to represent different machines), by changing the background colour.

I thought to myself "wouldn't it be great if the window icon could change background colour to set the actual background colour used by that terminal window".

So I did that.

By a little bit of custom CSS hackery, it loads the SVG via a stylesheet that overrides the fill colour of the background colour element, and sets it to the colour chosen by that terminal. The upshot here is that the icon used in the workspace switcher, window list, and other places, looks like the terminal window.

ANSI vs DEC, arbitrary scrolling in terminals

Lately I've been looking at trying to finish the effectively half-finished effort that DECSTBM, IL and DL give us, by extending it with column awareness. I notice that VT420 gives us these things; namely DECSLRM (set left/right margin) an analogy to DECSTM, and DECIC/DECDC, to insert or delete a column. Using this combination, you can define an arbitrary scrolling rectangle using DECSTBM+DECSLRM, then scroll it in any of the four directions by placing the cursor in the topleft corner and issuing IL/DL/DECIC/DECDC as required. The VT420 manual says that the terminal defaults to a mode wherein "Left and right margins cannot be changed." (DECVSSM; vertical split-screen mode). You have to enable it first by issuing CSI ? 69 h.

This scheme allows us all sorts of new abilities, such as:

• Up/downward scrolling of a vertically-split window by setting top/bottom/left/right margins and scrolling as normal with SU/SD.
• Bounded ICH/DCH that doesn't extend all the way to the righthand edge by setting right margin, allowing us to implement insert/delete in a readline-alike whose entry area is not the entire width of the terminal.

(Both of these abilities I would verymuch like ;) )

However in actual practice it's not quite as simple as this. DECSLRM is encoded as CSI s, to follow DECSTBM at CSI r. This creates a problem because ANSI.SYS defines CSI s as SAVE, an operation identical to DECSC.

So what to do about this problem? My initial thought was to say "ignore ANSI.SYS", and support just the DEC scheme. I feel that arbitrary scrolling is too important a feature to be lacking for the sake of this legacy compatibility.

I can therefore see a number of possible ways out of this:

0. Ignore DECSLRM and any column-based scrolling ability (the status quo). I dislike this because it means I don't get to use scrolling rectangles.
1. Entirely remove ANSI SAVE/RESTORE ability on CSI s/CSI t and repurpose CSI s to mean DECSLRM. I'd have no problem with this, but there may be the odd legacy application or two that somehow expects ANSI SAVE/RESTORE to actually work (even though it is semantically identical to the one-byte-shorter DECSC/DECRC).
2. Try to multiplex both meanings onto one sequence by using some sort of heuristic to determine which meaning might be meant. Such thoughts as:
   1. Use the value of DECVSSM to decide which meaning to apply to CSI s - if DECVSSM is enabled then CSI s means DECSLRM; if disabled it means ANSI SAVE. This feels to me the most preferrable solution.
   2. Use the value of mode ?1049 or similar, because most(all?) applications wanting to use scrolling rectangles will be using alternate buffer anyway. This would make it impossible to use DECSLRM in main-screen applications, such as any scrolling readline-alike console.
   3. Use the setting of DECSTBM to decide - if top/bottom margins are set it's likely that the application will want to set left/right and that it's an application that knows DEC-like things and won't want to use ANSI SAVE anyway. This does make it impossible to just use DECSLRM on its own though, to give you bounded ICH/DCH.
3. Ignore entirely what VT420 does, and extend this behaviour in some other way. Perhaps for example, allow DECSTBM to take up to four parameters, defining the left and right margins in the third and fourth. This has the notable advantage that any application currently sending just the two-parameter form simply supplies default values for the other two positions, implying the full column width.
4. Make it user-configurable at runtime by some config option, commandline flag, etc...

My votes in preference are 3, 2a, 1; and thereafter the rest all sound horrible. But I'd be interested in hearing what ideas anyone else has...