Nice idea! Might I suggest using HTML for the escape codes? The terminal would be basically unlimited if there was a built-in HTML renderer. Maybe you would need some high level "EnterHtml" and "ExitHtml" functions to simplify your scripting. But if it was HTML5 compatible, then you could generate canvases and draw on them, change your font colors, etc.
Hey, I am the author of notty. :-) I didn't see this post until I noticed the project's star count had jumped up again, but if anyone sees it now and has any questions please feel free to hit me up.
This looks quite interesting. I wonder, though, if it might be a good idea to cut back the scope of the project (at least initially). Replacing the ANSI escape sequences with something sane is a hard enough problem, I think, even if you were just going for feature parity. Fixing the colour palette problems would be amazing.
Terminals are such a mess. All the options on linux are lacking in some way or have legacy problems......<p>I hope someone actually finishes one of these 'next gen' terminals that keep getting abandoned.
> Dropdown menus, tooltips, and other features which do not strictly reside in the character grid<p>If it does this then it is heading into GUI application territory. I wonder if an existing GUI application could be extended to add command-line features to end up at the same place. Or does such a thing already exist? This might even be a faster way to get to this goal.