PuTTY wish utf8-plus-vt100

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summary: Simultaneous support for UTF-8 and enough ISO-2022 sequences for VT100 line drawing
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: fun: Just needs tuits, and not many of them.
priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.

It's been suggested that it might be nice for PuTTY to support the traditional VT100 line drawing behaviour (using ISO-2022 escape sequences such as ESC ( B, ESC ) 0, SO and SI) in the same mode as also supporting UTF-8. This would allow it to simultaneously support legacy applications which ran on a VT100 and hence never output any character value above 0x7F, and modern UTF-8-aware applications.

Markus Kuhn thinks this is wrong ("While a terminal emulator is in UTF-8 mode, any ISO 2022 escape sequences [...] are ignored"), and I (SGT) am inclined to agree, not least because the lack of easily corruptible ISO 2022 state is a useful defence against the confusion caused by accidentally spewing binary files into your standard output. On the other hand, I can see the potential utility of being able to run two classes of plausibly common application without needing a mode switch or luit. So I think that if we do this at all (which isn't clear, hence priority "low"), it should be a configurable option.

BJH points out that ISO 2022 requires that when we return from UTF-8 (by ESC % @) the ISO-2022 state must be the same as when we left, so if we did this then we'd have to keep a separate pseudo-ISO-2022 state inside the UTF-8 mode (and discard it on ESC % @, rather than preserving it until the next ESC % G).

Audit trail for this wish.

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(last revision of this bug record was at 2006-06-02 15:29:48 +0100)