FYI: New APIs in VTE 0.52

[egmontkob]

FYI: VTE 0.52 (to be released in March 2018) adds 3 new functionalities and their corresponding APIs (already present in git). It's up to you whether you want to hook up and make config options for them.

Hopefully Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 LTS is going to ship VTE 0.52. If you care about this distro and would like your app to offer these features in this long term support release, you should probably release a new version of your app in time which (conditionally to this VTE version) enables these features.

• vte_terminal_{get,set}_cell_{height,width}_scale: Increased line spacing and character spacing mostly for accessibility for people with imperfect sight.

• vte_terminal_{get,set}_bold_is_bright: Whether escape sequences such as \e[1;35m switch to bright colors in addition to bold (legacy behavior) or switch to bold and leave the color intact (new behavior, required for solarized, base16 and similar modern color schemes). (And while at it, we've removed "Allow bold text" from gnome-terminal's UI, and will probably start deprecating its API in about a year. I see no sane reason for this option to exist.)

• vte_terminal_{get,set}_text_blink_mode: VTE now implements blinking text (\e[5m) and enables it by default, this option lets you disable it or make it conditional to the terminal being (un)focused.

Please refer to VTE's source tree for details, e.g. compile with --enable-gtk-doc and check the generated docs under doc/reference/html/index.html.

[lanoxx]

I think it definitely makes sense to implement these new features. However I have little time to spend on tilda and I have been planning to make a release of tilda for quite some time now but never found the time until today. So before I wait even more weeks I decided to make the release of tilda 1.4 today with the features as they are right now.

Most likely this will be the version that makes it into Ubuntu 18.04 if I manage to create and upload a version of tilda into Debian before the feature freeze of Ubuntu goes into effect (e.g. next month). So unfortunately I think it is unlikely that these changes make it into tilda in time for Ubuntu 18.04.

[egmontkob]

FYI: vte-0.56 / gnome-terminal 3.32 (March 2019) will flip the default of "bold is bright" to false. That is, unless you add a config option or a hardwired call to re-enable it, tilda users will see a somewhat different (more logical, but maybe a bit unusual) behavior.