Terminology at the EFL Dev Day 2013

The 2013 edition of the EFL Dev Day was held in Edinburgh last Sunday. I gave a quick talk about Terminology.

I wanted to make a different talk from the one I gave at fosdem.

I decided to use Terminology to talk about Terminology and show some of its awesome features! I wrote a bash script to render my presentation. With Terminology escape codes, I was able to use real images as bullet points and inlined animated gifs to entertain my audience.

Escape codes

This code is now on github. You can run it yourself in Terminology.

To use images as bullet points, the following code is used:

echo -ne '\033}it#2;1;'$PWD'/item_00.png\0'
echo -ne '\033}ib\0##\033}ie\0'

Every terminology escape command starts with \033} and ends with \0. We use it to Insert a Thumbnail on a cell area of W cells wide and H cells hight. The format is CW;H;FULL-PATH with the following meaning:

C is the replace character to be identified in later text and will be replaced by the image.
W is the width in character cells (up to 511).
H is the height in character cells (up to 511).
FULL-PATH is the full path of the image to inline.

This escape code has no effect by itself. It indicates a future intention of inserting media into the terminal. Terminology will expect a grid of WxH “replace characters” to follow. Each sequence of such replace characters starts with a ib escape command and ends with an ie escape command.