Switching to termwiz from crossterm

[A-Walrus]

@archseer has said that he is thinking of switching to using termwiz instead of crossterm: comment

Opening this discussion to discuss pros and cons, and course of action.
Pros:

• Support for hyperlinks, which will allow clicking on hyperlinks within documentation popups to take you to documentation site.
• Builtin Surface and Cells which we currently implement ourselves and with better render diffing than what we currently have.
• Checking terminal capabilities
• Widgets, which we currently implement ourselves
• Uses usize instead of u16 which will eliminate outright the bugs that I have recently been trying to solve: Allow the editor area to be bigger than u16 (width and height remain u16) #4318, Fix rendering of lines longer than 2^16 #4172
• I believe I heard somewhere that it has better input handling and will allow mapping some inputs that crossterm has issues with, but I'm not sure...

Cons:

• A fair bit of code will need to be rewritten in order to make the switch.

If you have any other thoughts about crossterm vs termwiz please post here

[CptPotato]

Does termwiz support all the platforms that are currently supported by crossterm?

[A-Walrus]

I believe so. The docs say it supports unix style ttys and Windows style console APIs. which I take to mean that Linux, Mac and Windows should all be supported.

[David-Else]

Does #3725 work out of the box in termwiz, or if not, does it support it?

[CptPotato]

I wonder if this will also help with some of the input issues with different keyboard layouts.

For example, I am unable to use some keybinds like ~, | or any of the "unimpaired" ([/]) movements because of how modifier keys are recognized.

[dead10ck]

I've just come to learn that termwiz does not compile on Android due to unconditional use of shm, which is not supported on Android. This would be a pretty big deal for me, as I frequently edit with helix in Termux.

[yyogo]

looks like termwiz now compiles on android: wezterm/wezterm#2694

The shm use is still there (it panics on Android instead), but looks like it's only used by Kitty image encoding/decoding code which probably isn't critical for Helix

[rizary]

Hello, I found this when researching between crossterm and termwiz. May I ask is this still an option? I'm starting to start my own tui project and wondering if you'll choose termwiz for a new project?

[kirawi]

The switch isn't valuable as crossterm largely has feature parity with termwiz now (in the areas we need it to at least).