Linux Terminal – Support for ANSI Italic Escape Code

ansignome-terminallinuxterminal

I would like to replace GVim with Vim in the terminal. One of the nice things about GVim is that it is able to display text using italics.

Vim allows setting an ANSI escape code for italics (\e[3m), but this does not work in Gnome Terminal. Is there a terminal emulator that supports the ANSI escape code for italics?

Best Answer

I've tested a number of terminal emulators with echo -e "\e[3mfoo\e[23m" as suggested here. I went through the Arch wiki list, testing emulators in the official repositories.

Support italics

konsole 15.04.3
rxvt-unicode 9.21
tilda 1.2.4
xterm 318
gnome-terminal 3.16.2
pantheon-terminal 0.3.1.1
yakuake 2.9.9
roxterm 3.1.3
sakura 3.3.0
termite 10
mlterm 3.3.8
terminix 1.0.0
terminator 1.91
xfce4-terminal 0.8.5.1

Do not support italics

guake 0.7.2
lxterminal 0.2.0
rxvt 2.7.10
terminology 0.8.0
lilyterm 0.9.9.2
mate-terminal 1.10.1
xfce4-terminal 0.6.3
KiTTY 0.64.0.4
PuTTY 0.65 Beta

Related Solutions

Mac – get ubuntu terminal to send an escape sequence (control+shift+up)

Ubuntu uses GNOME and gnome-terminal. According to its documentation (in version 2.30), CtrlShiftUp and CtrlShiftDown are used for navigating the scrollback buffer, and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn this "feature" off (aside from modifying the source code of vte, the terminal library).

To patch vte on Ubuntu 10.04:

Rebuild vte, the terminal emulation library:

Install software required for compiling:

sudo apt-get install git-core fakeroot
sudo apt-get build-dep vte

Download vte source code and apply the patch:

cd /tmp
git clone git://gist.github.com/771667.git patches
apt-get source vte
cd vte-0.23.5
patch -p1 < ../patches/vte-0.23.5.patch

Make a Debian package and install it:

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
sudo dpkg -i ../libvte9_0.23.5-*.deb

Close all gnome-terminal processes.
Enjoy -- until the next vte update...

Patch for 0.23:

diff -ur vte-0.23.5/src/vte.c vte-0.23.5+patched/src/vte.c
--- vte-0.23.5/src/vte.c    2010-01-14 02:46:18.000000000 +0200
+++ vte-0.23.5+patched/src/vte.c    2011-01-09 15:19:01.000000000 +0200
@@ -4948,26 +4948,6 @@
            }
            break;
        /* Keypad/motion keys. */
-       case GDK_KP_Up:
-       case GDK_Up:
-           if (modifiers & GDK_CONTROL_MASK 
-                            && modifiers & GDK_SHIFT_MASK) {
-               vte_terminal_scroll_lines(terminal, -1);
-               scrolled = TRUE;
-               handled = TRUE;
-               suppress_meta_esc = TRUE;
-           }
-           break;
-       case GDK_KP_Down:
-       case GDK_Down:
-           if (modifiers & GDK_CONTROL_MASK
-                            && modifiers & GDK_SHIFT_MASK) {
-               vte_terminal_scroll_lines(terminal, 1);
-               scrolled = TRUE;
-               handled = TRUE;
-               suppress_meta_esc = TRUE;
-           }
-           break;
        case GDK_KP_Page_Up:
        case GDK_Page_Up:
            if (modifiers & GDK_SHIFT_MASK) {

Patch for 0.26:

diff -ur vte-0.26.2/src/vte.c vte-0.26.2+patched/src/vte.c
--- vte-0.26.2/src/vte.c    2010-11-13 14:18:41.000000000 +0200
+++ vte-0.26.2+patched/src/vte.c    2011-01-09 15:06:54.870000002 +0200
@@ -5153,26 +5153,6 @@
            }
            break;
        /* Keypad/motion keys. */
-       case GDK_KEY (KP_Up):
-       case GDK_KEY (Up):
-           if (modifiers & GDK_CONTROL_MASK 
-                            && modifiers & GDK_SHIFT_MASK) {
-               vte_terminal_scroll_lines(terminal, -1);
-               scrolled = TRUE;
-               handled = TRUE;
-               suppress_meta_esc = TRUE;
-           }
-           break;
-       case GDK_KEY (KP_Down):
-       case GDK_KEY (Down):
-           if (modifiers & GDK_CONTROL_MASK
-                            && modifiers & GDK_SHIFT_MASK) {
-               vte_terminal_scroll_lines(terminal, 1);
-               scrolled = TRUE;
-               handled = TRUE;
-               suppress_meta_esc = TRUE;
-           }
-           break;
        case GDK_KEY (KP_Page_Up):
        case GDK_KEY (Page_Up):
            if (modifiers & GDK_SHIFT_MASK) {

Linux – How to disable terminal control escape sequences in Linux

Most (if not all) cases where a *nix command prints colored output without the user specifically asking for it with an option involve aliases. In fact, many Linux distributions include an alias for ls and grep specifying colors in the global /etc/bash.bashrc.

These are from my Linux Mint Debian Edition:

$ grep alias /etc/bash.bashrc
    alias ls='ls --color=auto'
    alias grep='grep --colour=auto'

So, if your program is calling these commands through BASH, you are running ls --color=auto instead of ls.

You can bypass aliases in BASH (maybe other shells too but I have not tried it) by the following methods (taken from here):

the full pathname of the command: /bin/ls
command substitution: $(which ls)
the command builtin: command ls
double quotation marks: "ls"
single quotation marks: 'ls'
a backslash character: \ls

If you use one of these methods in your software you should not have to worry about escape sequences.