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Private Mode for Terminal Visibility Reports

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Terminal applications may perform expensive rendering work even when their output cannot be seen. Focus reports do not solve this problem: an unfocused terminal may remain visible, while a focused terminal may be occluded, suspended, or displayed in a background tab.

This specification defines a new DEC Private Mode that enables terminal visibility reports:

2033 - Enable or disable terminal visibility reports

Visibility is an advisory, conservative state. It combines the terminal’s own knowledge of its tabs, panes, and views with visibility information provided by the host platform. Applications can use the report to reduce expensive visual updates while their terminal view is not visible.

Private Mode for Automatic Paste Notifications

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Terminal applications commonly use bracketed paste mode (private mode 2004) to distinguish between typed input and pasted content. This prevents accidental command execution and allows special handling of multi-line pastes. However, bracketed paste only provides plain text data and no MIME type information.

The Kitty clipboard protocol defines a request-response mechanism for reading and writing clipboard data with full MIME type support. However, this requires applications to explicitly request clipboard data, which doesn’t integrate naturally with paste events.

OSC 9;4 - Progress Bar Sequence

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The OSC 9;4 sequence is a terminal escape sequence originally created by ConEmu for displaying progress bars. It has since been adopted by other terminal emulators including Ghostty and Windows Terminal.

In supporting terminals, this sequence can display a native GUI progress bar that shows operation progress, completion state, and errors.

lsr: ls but with io_uring

Tue, 06 May 2025 11:15:50 -0500

As an excercise in syscall golf, I wrote an implementation of ls(1) which uses my IO library, ourio to perform as much of the IO as possible. What I ended up with is something that is faster than any version or alternative to ls I tested, and also performs an order of magnitude fewer syscalls. I’m calling it lsr. Let’s start with the benchmarks, then we’ll see how we got there.

Private Mode for In-Band Window Resize Notifications

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Terminal emulators typically receive window resize events by installing a signal handler for the SIGWINCH signal. Handling of these signals can create challenges due to their inherently racy properties. Resize events must be synchronized with other application state in a safe manner.

Standard control sequences exist to query the current terminal size from the terminal and receive an in-band control sequence with the window size. However, this system requires polling - which is not ideal. Usually, SIGWINCH handling is preferred.