Foot’s policy is to not set environment variables that identifies
it (except the well-known and established `TERM` variable).
We encourage applications to use terminfo to determine capabilities,
or terminal queries, when available. Or, at least use terminal queries
to detect the terminal and its version.
Setting environment variables is a bad idea since they are inherited
by all applications started by the terminal (which is the whole
point). But, this includes other terminal emulators, making it very
possible a terminal emulator gets mis-detected just because it was
started from another terminal.
Since there are a couple of terminal emulators that _do_ set
TERM_PROGRAM and TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION, unset these environment
variables to avoid being misdetected.
Closes#1349
The default foot output looks like this, in Debian testing "bookworm"
at the time of writing:
anarcat@angela:pubpaste$ foot true
info: main.c:421: version: 1.13.1 +pgo +ime +graphemes -assertions
info: main.c:428: arch: Linux x86_64/64-bit
info: main.c:440: locale: fr_CA.UTF-8
info: config.c:3003: loading configuration from /home/anarcat/.config/foot/foot.ini
info: fcft.c:338: fcft: 3.1.5 +graphemes -runs +svg(nanosvg) -assertions
info: fcft.c:377: fontconfig: 2.13.1, freetype: 2.12.1, harfbuzz: 5.2.0
info: fcft.c:838: /home/anarcat/.local/share/fonts/Fira-4.202/otf/FiraMono-Regular.otf: size=8.00pt/8px, dpi=75.00
info: wayland.c:1353: eDP-1: 2256x1504+0x0@60Hz 0x095F 13.32" scale=2 PPI=205x214 (physical) PPI=136x143 (logical), DPI=271.31
info: wayland.c:1509: requesting SSD decorations
info: fcft.c:838: /home/anarcat/.local/share/fonts/Fira-4.202/otf/FiraMono-Bold.otf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
info: fcft.c:838: /home/anarcat/.local/share/fonts/Fira-4.202/otf/FiraMono-Regular.otf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
info: fcft.c:838: /home/anarcat/.local/share/fonts/Fira-4.202/otf/FiraMono-Bold.otf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
info: fcft.c:838: /home/anarcat/.local/share/fonts/Fira-4.202/otf/FiraMono-Regular.otf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
info: terminal.c:700: cell width=19, height=39
info: terminal.c:588: using 16 rendering threads
info: wayland.c:859: using SSD decorations
info: main.c:680: goodbye
anarcat@angela:pubpaste$
That's 17 lines of output that are *mostly* useless for most use
cases. I might understand having this output during the project's
startup, when it's helpful for diagnostics, but now Foot just mostly
works everywhere, and I've never had a use for any of that stuff in
the (arguably short) time I've been using Foot so far.
And if I do, there's the `--log-level` commandline option to tweak
this. At first, I looked at tweaking the log level through the config
file. But as explained in this issue:
https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/issues/1142
... there's a chicken and egg problem there that makes it hard to
implement and possibly confusing for users as well.
There's also the possibility for users to change the shortcut with
which they start foot, for example a `.desktop` file so that menu
systems that support those start foot properly. But that only works in
that environment, and not through the so many things that will just
call `foot` and hope it will do the right thing.
In my case, I have `foot` hardcoded in a lot of places now, between
sway and waybar, and this is only going to grow. Others have suggested
adding the flag to a $TERMINAL global variable, but that won't help
.desktop users.
So, instead of playing whack-a-mole with the log levels, just make it
so that, by default, foot is silent. This is actually one of the
[basics of UNIX philosophy][1]:
> Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it
> should say nothing.
And yes, I am aware I am severely violating that principle by writing
a way too long commit log for a one-line patch, but there you go, I
figured it was good to document the why of this properly.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20031102053334/http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html
The meson command line option -Dcustom-terminfo-install-location has
been changed in the following ways:
* If unset, $datadir/terminfo is used, and TERMINFO is *not* exported
* If set, that value (relative to $prefix) is used, and TERMINFO *is*
exported.
* The special value ‘no’ is removed.
-Ddefault-terminfo now also changes the terminfo names generated when
-Dterminfo=enabled.
Furthermore, the documentation for the TERMINFO environment variable
has been removed from the foot.1 and footclient.1 man pages (but as
mentioned above, foot *will* still set it if
-Dcustom-terminfo-install-location has been used).
INSTALL.md has been updated to now recommend using ncurses’ terminfo
definitions, if available. But also to document the other
alternatives; installing the terminfo definitions in a custom
location, or installing them with a diferent name. It also describes
the general problem, and the disadvantages of each alternative (but
without going into too much depth).
As of 2021-07-31, ncurses ships its own version of foot’s terminfo.
Since:
* It doesn’t have the non-standard Sync,Tc,setrgbf,setrgbb
capabilities.
* It doesn’t set hs,fsl,dsl (statusbar).
* We want to be able to update our termminfo without waiting for an
ncurses release.
* Foot should be installable and usable on Linux systems that doesn’t
have the latest ncurses.
we still want to ship our own version. We can however not install it
to the default terminfo location (e.g. /usr/share/terminfo), since it
will collide with the ncurses provided files.
Our options are to either rename our terminfo to something else, or to
keep the name, but install our terminfo files somewhere else.
The first option would be the easy one. However, I think it makes
sense to use the same name. For example, a user that SSH’s into a
remote system that does *not* have our own version installed,
but *does* have the ncurses one, will gracefully fall back to that
one, which is better than manually having to set
e.g. TERM=xterm-256color.
Now, if we want to use the same name, we need to install it somewhere
else. But where? And how do we ensure our version is preferred over
the ncurses one?
I opted to $datadir/foot/terminfo (e.g. /usr/share/foot/terminfo) by
default. It makes it namespaced to foot (i.e. we’re not introducing a
new “standard” terminfo location), thus guaranteeing it wont collide
with ncurses.
To enable applications to find it, we export TERMINFO_DIRS. This is a
list of *additional* directories to search for terminfo files. If it’s
already defined, we *append* to it.
The nice thing with this is, if there’s no terminfo in that
location (e.g. when you SSH into a remote), the default terminfo
location is *also* searched. But only *after* having searched through
TERMINFO_DIRS.
In short: our version is preferred, but the ncurses one (or an older
version of our terminfo package!) will be used if ours cannot be
found.
To enable packagers full control over the new behavior, the existing
meson command line options have been modified, and a new option added:
-Dterminfo=disabled|enabled|auto: *build* and *install* the terminfo
files.
-Dcustom-terminfo-install-location=<path>: *where* the terminfo files
are expected to be found.
This *needs* to be set *even* if -Dterminfo=disabled. For example, if
the packaging script builds and packages the terminfo files separate
from the regular foot build. The path is *relative to $prefix*, and
defaults to $datadir/foot/terminfo.
This is the value that will be appended to TERMINFO_DIRS. Note that
you can set it to ‘no’, in which case foot will *not* set/modify
TERMINFO_DIRS. Only do this if you don’t intend to package foot’s
terminfo files at all (i.e. you plan on using the ncurses ones only).
-Ddefault-terminfo=foot. Allows overriding the default TERM
value. This should only be changed if the target platform doesn’t
support terminfo files.
Closes#671
This means that logging will be completely disabled until log_init()
has been called, which is useful to prevent log spam when running
UNITTEST{} blocks in debug builds.
Note that this doesn't change the default log level at runtime, which
was already being set to LOG_CLASS_INFO in main.c and client.c.
The new log level is also exposed to the command-line interface as
`--log-level=none`, which allows disabling logging entirely.
e813883367 added “missing” short command
line options to footclient.
Except they weren’t missing; they were intentionally missing short
options and only supported long options.
This commit makes the new/missing short options “official”, by adding
documentation, zsh completions and including them in usage().
Foot is a Wayland client and cannot be run outside of a Wayland
session. As such, it makes more sense to use $WAYLAND_SESSION instead
of $XDG_SESSION_ID in the default socket path since this makes it
clearer which Wayland session we belong to.
Closes#55.
This means command line parsing stops when it encounters the first
nonoption argument.
The result is that one no longer need to use '--' to ensure arguments
are passed to the shell/command, instead of parsed by foot.
That is, instead of
foot -- sh -c true
one can now do
foot sh -c true
Arguments to foot *must* go before the command:
foot --fullscreen sh -c true
We now create a copy of the config for each client, and updates it
with the values passed from the client.
Since we're not actually cloning it (and e.g. strdup() all strings
etc) we can't call conf_destroy() to free it, but need to free just
the strings we've replaced.
