Unicode support [LWN.net]

Unicode support

Posted Mar 31, 2018 5:07 UTC (Sat) by shiar (guest, #67206)
Parent article: A look at terminal emulators, part 1

A more elaborate Unicode sampler will show various different difficiencies in all emulators. Character display mostly depends on font coverage, but emulators will often fail to align them properly, or break on selection or scrolling.

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Unicode support

Posted Mar 31, 2018 16:21 UTC (Sat) by anarcat (subscriber, #66354) [Link]

Really nice sampler! I wish I had found out about that one earlier...

From what I can tell, gnome-terminal (and vte derivatives) displays the test pretty well, but fails to align RTL paragraphs to the right, as I have found in my tests.

However, it seems that urxvt doesn't find some scripts: the tibetan declaration of rights shows up as boxes. In xterm, they show up as blanks.

Alignment is great in rxvt, xterm, gnome-term, but Konsole somewhat fails in the math formulas, just like my web browser (FF 59). Strangely, most terminals fail the first "compact font overview" except Konsole.. Alacritty also has alignment issues and significant latency in loading the file.

pterm seems impeccable all around, and i suspect mlterm would also do the right thing, but i only have the older 3.5 Debian version on hand...

So yeah, I guess that, again, pterm/mlterm would win at displaying unicode here as well, and the test shows some flaws in urxvt/xterm rendering that my simpler tests did not clearly show (although I did find issues with xterm).