Status Bar is Fixed?

General
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I’m getting status bar corruption, VT100 emulator. CLS works great. But as soon as I scroll past the screen, like issuing a HELP command, it’s all screwed up. Wasn’t this fixed a few months ago?

My version is latest (almost?) dated 14 Mar 2025 commit CBCAD09

-Chris

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Are you on Windooz or Linux? Which terminal program do you use?

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I am using a terminal emulator poorly-named “Serial” on MacOS. If you think it makes a difference, I’ll try Linux and Windows and see what happens. And it’s possible, I may be loco :sunglasses:

One point of note, on initialization or issuing CLS, the screen looks amazing with the colored status bar. It appears to me that the ANSI / VT100 codes are being recognized, at the beginning, at least.

-Chris

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I have not experienced any status bar corruption lately. I use teraterm under windows, so that would be the best tested option.

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Thanks, will test in the morning. Not sure why the OS matters. But if different terminal emulators aren’t 100% “true” to the standard, that makes sense.

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When i was using minicom and screen on linux my terminal was also going bananaz😎 then switched to tio and never any problem. So thats why I ask about terminal emulator used. I just failed at guessing your system. One or the other? None of the two.

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Our VT100 code is bog standard. Nothing fancy or system specific, all straight from the VT100 specs.

There are tons of additions and variants, customizations etc, and each terminal app developer tests against whatever they use most. Things end up quirky.

There is a library called NCURSES that attempts to identify a terminal and send terminal specific code, among other things. I really don’t want to use it though.

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Okay, I can report that TeraTerm works perfectly. Problem solved.

As someone old enough to remember all these terminal compatibility issues, both within emulators and real terminals, I agree with you that it’s not worth the headaches these days to try and support different terminal types. Almost nobody is actually using a terminal anymore. I’d guess nearly 100% of users are using a terminal emulator set to VT100 / ANSI mode.

The only reason someone might reach for NCURSES these days would not be for various terminals support, but just to abstract away the details of handling the escape sequences to the terminal. You’ve already coded up all those cursor movement escape sequences yourself, so I agree, at this point there’s no reason to change to ncurses.

Back to my original issue, there is clearly something wrong with my terminal emulator program. I will reach out to the author and ask (despite the Apple-like stupid simple program name Serial, this is not an Apple utility, but a third party paid-for program. He’s been pretty responsive in the past to answer questions.

There is one nagging thought I will keep in the back of my mind … I don’t remember if / how big a difference there is between VT100 and ANSI adopted control codes. I wonder if some subtle thing like that could be at the root of my problem. Anyway, I’ll report back if I learn anything more.

-Chris

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One thing that may cause issues are the 8 bit RGB color codes. Someone actually added a library to compile a firmware with ANSI color codes instead of RGB specifically for Mac. This may be related?

# by default this project uses LGPL3 libraries, if you do not want to comply
# with LGPL3 license, please set the following variable to FALSE, otherwise
# you are oblicated to distribute the resulted binaries under LGPL3 license
set(USE_LGPL3 TRUE CACHE BOOL "indicated if to include LGPL3 protected code")
include(../cmake/ansi_colours_import.cmake)
if(USE_LGPL3)
if(LEGACY_ANSI_COLOURS_ENABLED)
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