There's no escaping it: an exploration of ANSI codes (blog.safia.rocks)

I was expecting something more... informative?

This would be far better without the slop and just the widget with a little bit of explanatory text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code goes a bit more in-depth.

I am not sure if it's part of the ANSI standard, but the AmigaDOS shell supported a set of ANSI codes that provided single line stepping - not a whole text line/row, but a single raster line - allowing for pretty advanced graphics rendering by overlaying rows of text shifted by just one or two pixels vertically. It was a tad fancier than the very common ASCII art, being used in the same venues and always a "treat" to come across, though not as common due to the size and additional time needed to render.

I have never quite found a full and comprehensive catalogue of escape sequences. I think the last time I needed a list, I found a developer of a terminal app(might have been kitty?) had a page with what they had found.

This isn't no much a specification as a collection of variously supported codes.

Some have been deliberately killed off (like setting the window title to the string returned from a commandline string). An escape code so powerful that it gives text files shell access.

> Even fancier terminal UIs, like Vim and htop, extend the ANSI codes for cursor positioning and screen manipulation

These aren't an extension. They're either part of ECMA-48 like the color codes or legacy from VT52/VT100 that has become de facto standard.

As an aside, I'd always been told that the actual ANSI X3.64 standard wasn't available unless you paid $$$ for it, and that's why people referred to ECMA-48 instead. Recently, I discovered that it has been available for free all this time from the US government, who republished it as FIPS Pub 86: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub86.pdf