Comment by maficious

4 years ago

Refterm is a not a full-featured terminal in terms of configurability, but it has all the features needed for rendering. Configuration like: choosing fonts, choosing colors, tabs, whatever, it's misc. features, which are unrelated to rendering. The case here is about rendering and it's exactly what is shite in every terminal emulator. I don't understand why everyone is arguing about it anyway. Refterm provides a fix, Windows Terminal should simply implement it. Is this dignity or what? Are you not engineers? Should you not prioritise software quality above everything else?

EDIT: Remove argument about ease of development, because refterm is easy.

This bugs me every time. "Wow, this software works so good, but we are not gonna make our software like that, no, we'll stick to our shite implementation."

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maficious

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makomk  4 years ago

The fact that Casey Muratori's proposed approach requires the terminal to reimplement the process of correctly mapping characters to glyphs - including stuff like fallbacks to other fonts - is a huge part of the argument for why it's much harder to implement and more complicated than he claims. If it really doesn't do that right for something as simple as a decimal seperator for the font some random HN commenter happened to use, that does tend to suggest the Microsoft employees are in the right here.

  • maficious  4 years ago

    The "font some random HN commenter happened to use" is some f****** proportional Calibri. I want to see someone use it in any terminal emulator. Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code, but, fair enough, it doesn't have fallback yet.

    Its' description says also: "Reference monospace terminal renderer". "monospace" is there for a reason.

    It's worth mentioning though, that Windows Terminal also defaults to Cascadia Code and Cascadia Code was installed automatically on my machine, so it's de-facto the new monospace standard font on Windows starting from 10.

  • withinboredom  4 years ago

    You can’t use a non-monospace font on a tiled space. Like that literally makes no sense. Of course it won’t look right. This is like asking why you can’t use `out` parameters on an inherent async function.

    • makomk  4 years ago

      Whether the font is monospace or not isn't really the problem - that causes some aesthetically ugly spacing, but that's to be expected and it's still readable. The big issue is that the code has completely failed to find a glyph for one of the characters used in something as commonplace as a directory listing from the dir command and people expect better than this from font rendering in modern applications.

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    • maficious  4 years ago

      Then again, refterm doesn't f*ck it up. It still renders proportional font; just aligned to tiles. It is essentially doing the same as for emoji.