Re: [Nmh-workers] colorized/highlighted scan output?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ken,

> for example, man outputs "bold" text by doing overstriking with ^H and
> less knows how to deal; I don't know if that was planned as much as it
> is an artifact of history.

man (nroff) gets bold by overstriking because moving the teletype's head
back and putting down more ink is the best it could do.  Later, some
terminals, the real kind, not xterm(1), could spot this and embolden
that cell's glyph.  nroff has an \o escape to overstrike up to nine
characters, e.g. é is \o'e\'';  that worked best on paper, obviously.

> I just looked; ls, at least, hardcodes the ANSI sequence strings into
> the code (hm, so does grep).  I don't know if that's standard practice
> or not; somehow doing that still sticks in my craw.

There is dircolors(1) to help set LS_COLORS for ls(1) to read, e.g.
`dircolors --print-database', but I agree with disliking hard-coding
ANSI escape sequences.

Cheers, Ralph.