I am not sure if it's part of the ANSI standard, but the AmigaDOS shell supported a set of ANSI codes that provided single line stepping - not a whole text line/row, but a single raster line - allowing for pretty advanced graphics rendering by overlaying rows of text shifted by just one or two pixels vertically. It was a tad fancier than the very common ASCII art, being used in the same venues and always a "treat" to come across, though not as common due to the size and additional time needed to render.
I recommend starting with ECMA-35. The actual structure of escape sequences is explained there. Otherwise it gets lost that it's the ESC [ that is the entire escape sequence, an alternative form of CSI, and that this actually is one part of an entire mechanism of escape sequences with intermediate and final bytes. It's a control sequence that CSI then introduces.
The important part is that the escape prefix is just an alternate way to represent each of the 32 C1 control characters with a pair of 7-bit characters.
I have never quite found a full and comprehensive catalogue of escape sequences. I think the last time I needed a list, I found a developer of a terminal app(might have been kitty?) had a page with what they had found.
This isn't no much a specification as a collection of variously supported codes.
Some have been deliberately killed off (like setting the window title to the string returned from a commandline string). An escape code so powerful that it gives text files shell access.
Though, the big one is C1. OS commands and CSI (graphics, cursors, etc.) are both defined in it.
And hyperlinks have sorta default to ESC]8 but its not in any of the standards. Ta to Gnome and VTE for making it semi-supported everywhere.
The Linux manpage for ANSI escapes is pretty comprehensive as a catalogue. [1] If you're looking for what you can actually use, and what has been deprecated, man should be the first stop.
I am not sure if it's part of the ANSI standard, but the AmigaDOS shell supported a set of ANSI codes that provided single line stepping - not a whole text line/row, but a single raster line - allowing for pretty advanced graphics rendering by overlaying rows of text shifted by just one or two pixels vertically. It was a tad fancier than the very common ASCII art, being used in the same venues and always a "treat" to come across, though not as common due to the size and additional time needed to render.
> Even fancier terminal UIs, like Vim and htop, extend the ANSI codes for cursor positioning and screen manipulation
These aren't an extension. They're either part of ECMA-48 like the color codes or legacy from VT52/VT100 that has become de facto standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code goes a bit more in-depth.
I was expecting something more... informative?
Start with ECMA-48 https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
Then find DEC and XTerm extensions https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html
I recommend starting with ECMA-35. The actual structure of escape sequences is explained there. Otherwise it gets lost that it's the ESC [ that is the entire escape sequence, an alternative form of CSI, and that this actually is one part of an entire mechanism of escape sequences with intermediate and final bytes. It's a control sequence that CSI then introduces.
The important part is that the escape prefix is just an alternate way to represent each of the 32 C1 control characters with a pair of 7-bit characters.
I have never quite found a full and comprehensive catalogue of escape sequences. I think the last time I needed a list, I found a developer of a terminal app(might have been kitty?) had a page with what they had found.
This isn't no much a specification as a collection of variously supported codes.
Some have been deliberately killed off (like setting the window title to the string returned from a commandline string). An escape code so powerful that it gives text files shell access.
Or, a collection of specifications.
C0 in ISO 6429
C1 in ECMA-48
Though, the big one is C1. OS commands and CSI (graphics, cursors, etc.) are both defined in it.
And hyperlinks have sorta default to ESC]8 but its not in any of the standards. Ta to Gnome and VTE for making it semi-supported everywhere.
The Linux manpage for ANSI escapes is pretty comprehensive as a catalogue. [1] If you're looking for what you can actually use, and what has been deprecated, man should be the first stop.
[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man4/console_codes.4.html
This would be far better without the slop and just the widget with a little bit of explanatory text.