mobile-shell / mobile-shell/mosh

True color escape sequences are even more complicated

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C++
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Description

It's recently been discovered that everybody's been implementing true-color escape sequences with colons wrong, it seems.

People have been implementing ESC [38:2:0:255:0m, but it should apparently be ESC [38:2:<colorspace>:0:255:0m, according to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791456 and https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/6377. libvte and iTerm2 have both added support for this new, correct variant.

Currently this is an academic point because Mosh only implements the semicolon variant, and I don't think anybody has any desire to change that variant's behavior for compatibility reasons. But when we do parse the colon variant, we should probably handle the old, mistaken variant as well as this new variant.

Thanks to George Nachman's ITerm2 release notes for pointing this out and catching my eye.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating Mosh's escape-sequence parser and its existing semicolon true-color handling. Read the cited GNOME VTE and iTerm2 references, then determine the intended handling for both colon variants; done means the parser accepts the correct colorspace form and preserves compatibility with the older form.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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