Support italic text

[egmont]

This ticket is for future reference, currently it's a proof of concept only.

Some terminals (the ones I know about right now are: rxvt-unicode and vte (gnome-terminal etc.)) support italic text. To test whether your terminal supports it, try this command:

echo $'Normal \e[3mItalic\e[0m'

I've created proof of concept patches for SLang and MC - if you patch both, and compile mc against the patched slang, you'll get italic support in your skins.

I've talked to ncurses's author, he said he'll consider adding support. I'm just about to contact slang's developers.

In order for mc to add proper support, the following would be required:

• at least one of ncurses and slang (but ideally both) providing mainstream support
• configure-time autodetect whether the required constants are defined

Let's hope this can happen at some point in the future.

[egmont]

screenshot

[egmont]

patch for slang

[egmont]

patch for mc

[egmont]

(Just for the record: Konsole's latest version also supports italic.)

[egmont]

My slang patch made it to dev snapshot pre2.3.0-107, so forthcoming slang-2.3.0 will support italics :)

[andrew_b]

Replying to egmont:

My slang patch made it to dev snapshot pre2.3.0-107, so forthcoming slang-2.3.0 will support italics :)

But ncurses does't yet.

Well, in this case mc must require newest slang (>= 2.3.0). I don't thing this is good idea. If we use the #ifdef for slang-italic-related code, what about skins? Will attributes like bold+italic+underline be parsed correctly w/o italic support?

[egmont]

That's why I started my ticket with "this ticket is for future reference" :) I don't think it should be applied yet, I'm just gathering information. IMO we should wait at least until slang 2.3 is officially released and see where ncurses is at that time, or maybe even wait until ncurses adds support.

Skins will be parsed correctly and italic will be ignored if we put "#if SLANG_VER >= 20300" guards properly.

[dickey]

​http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/NEWS-contents.html#t20130831

[egmont]

Cool, thanks :) I wasn't keeping an eye on ncurses snapshots.

I'll come up with a proper mc patch soon.

[egmont]

Now that slang-2.3 is out with italic support, and ncurses weekly snapshots have supported it for over a year, I went ahead and updated the patch.

Could you please try it out, review and apply?

I've added some #ifdef guards so that it still compiles with older version, you just silently won't get italic support then.

I've tested with old ncurses, old slang (=> compiles, no italic), new ncurses, new slang (italic works).

[egmont]

Italic patch, updated

[egmont]

Friendly ping... Could you please take a look at the patch?

At least two leading distributions will ship slang-2.3 in their next release (Ubuntu Vivid and Fedora 22 expected this April / May - not sure about the other distros), making it possible to use italic text in mc skins. I think it's a really cool feature :)

[andrew_b]

Thanks!

Branch: 3065_italic
Initial changeset:89d2db5ca3f27e19a3f2551706ef515879faa846

[andrew_b]

Merged to master: [e7e3aed174d94c90d00c9bb13e9218442a5fcdbb].

git log --pretty=oneline 45d135d..e7e3aed