Querying the terminal for capablities

[BWindey]

Hi there. I hope I'm in the right place to ask, but I'm intrigued by

Libvaxis does not use terminfo. Support for vt features is detected through terminal queries.

As I'm building my own little TUI-lib/framework, I've come need to solve some of these issues as well, and I'm intrigued by how you did it.

One thing that I've kinda figured out is how to query if Kitty's keyboard protocol is implemented. The issue there is that I need to keep polling until the terminal responds (keep doing libc::read() until the result is not empty - terminal is set to nonblocking).
How do you deal with that? Is there a smarter way?

I'm unfamiliar with Zig and trying to understand the code did not really help, I'm a bit lost...

Aside from querying for Kitty's keyboard protocol, what kind of things can you query for too? Color-support? Grapheme-width (bit advanced, but there's a write-up by Mitchell's blog: https://mitchellh.com/writing/grapheme-clusters-in-terminals)?

I hope this is the right place to chat about this, as I'm eager to learn more!

[rockorager]

This is a good place! I'm on vacation and can give some more detail in a week. In the meantime, check out the XTGETTCAP query (detail here https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-devlog-004) and DECRQM. These two can get you pretty far with querying for capabilities.

[BWindey]

Thank you!
I hope you'll enjoy your holiday. In the meantime I'll read up on those two.