A Definitive Guide to Enabling Italics in Vim and Tmux

https://rsapkf.netlify.com/blog/enabling-italics-vim-tmux

by zdw • 6 years ago

96 35 6 years ago

rsapkf.netlify.com

Athas• 6 years ago

I'm down with the hacking aspect here, but why would I want to render comments in italics? Comments are often larger pieces of natural language, and there's a reason we don't typeset our books in all-italics - it's harder to read.

zokier2• 6 years ago

There is also a reason why we don't typeset books in monospaced fonts, but oh well...

laumars4• 6 years ago

Yup, because it's cheaper (more words per line / fewer pages).

You could argue it is easier to read (and better for the environment too) but it wasn't that long ago when fixed width was the norm (typewriters, dot-matrix printers, early micro-computers / mainframes, etc) and people read just fine.

animalnewbie2• 6 years ago

Monaco (and I'm the last guy in earth to be labelled an apple fan) is my favourite font. Its damn readable. There are a lot of other readable mono fonts.

Also code inherently has a structure whose readability is increased by monospace fonts.

Lio• 6 years ago

I do it because most of the time I’m more interested in code than comments.

In my experience comments often ”lie”, so I put them in italics because they’re to taken with a pinch of salt. :)

threatofrain• 6 years ago

I switch my theme based on how I’m trying to read. Some themes emphasize comments, others deprioritizes them.

cygned• 6 years ago

I don't use syntax highlighting. Italicized comments help my eyes skip them, especially when using a font whose italics characters are notably different (e.g. Operator Mono).

schwuk• 6 years ago

There is a growing number of monospaced fonts that provide cursive italics for differentiation e.g., Operator Mono, Dank, Victor Mono.

Some people prefer it, some people hate it.

thristian• 6 years ago

Interestingly, italic type was invented in 1500 in order to make smaller, more space-efficient books - so the first books in italics were in all-italics. It wasn't until decades later that italics started being used sparingly for emphasis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type#History

emmelaich• 6 years ago

The echo command check didn't work for me on MacOS, bash 3.2

This works

   printf  "\e[3m foo \e[23m\n"

Although, you could use the sequence '^vESC' for each '\e' with echo.

tomsmeding2• 6 years ago

In case anyone thinks they're doing something equivalent by making a screen-256color-italic terminfo with the right keys and making sure your terminal uses that, but is then surprised that it doesn't work, the linked tmux FAQ ie very important:

As of tmux 2.1, if default-terminal is set to "screen" or matches " screen-* ", tmux will behave like screen and italics will be disabled.

This means that you must use a terminfo name that doesn't start with screen-*.

JdeBP3• 6 years ago

That's slightly misleading. The applications that get directed to a "screen-wibble" terminfo entry will behave as if they are running under screen, because there will be no terminfo ritm/sitm capabilities and they won't emit any control sequences for specifying italics.

tmux's own behaviour does change, but that is secondary, and a bit of a bodge. (The applications will emit what they think is something else, but will end up emitting the ECMA-48 code for italics, so tmux refuses to recognize it.)

djohnston• 6 years ago

on a related note, can someone point me to a definitive guide for getting clipboards to work between vim, tmux, and my local machine?

my workflow rn is ... suboptimal

alpaca128• 6 years ago

You can set Vim to use the clipboard as default register, meaning all yank, delete and paste operations will directly use the clipboard:

  set clipboard=unnamedplus

Although of course that won't work if vim runs in ssh.

Not sure about tmux, I found it too cumbersome when it comes to scrolling and text selection, so I switched to dvtm some time ago(which has its own issues).

knoebber• 6 years ago

Use emacs + evil; y and p share the same clipboard as the system.

JdeBP3• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, this is not definitive. Here are a bunch of corrections, off the top of my head:

* echo -e is not portable across shells, and even across versions of the same shell sometimes. The test output should be generated with printf. https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/65803/5132

* The article erroneously says "If you don't see italicised foo above, then you need to add a custom terminfo." where what it should say is "If vim does not emit this control sequence", or it should have an intermediate example using tput in place of hardwired control sequences. A custom terminfo will not affect the echo/printf command of the raw control sequences at all.

* The sideswipe about "better terminal emulators" mentioning only 3 fashionable ones is not well-founded. In fact, most terminal emulators (from XTerm to Konsole, including even recent VTE-based ones) support italicization. Supporting the boldface/roman/italics triad that has been in Unix document processing for approaching half a century is not a niche or novel thing.

* The xterm-256color entry in terminfo already has ritm= and sitm= capabilities (via xterm-base and ecma+italics). There's no need to make one's own from someone's file on GitHub. https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-xt...

* The correct terminal type for tmux in terminfo is tmux or tmux-256color, which again already have ritm and sitm (again via ecma+italics). There is no need for a "new entry called 'tmux'". One should already have been there for roughly 5 years now. https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-tm...

hyperpallium• 6 years ago

I had italics in vim (TERM was xterm-256color), but not in tmux (TERM was screen).

Added this to ~/.tmux.conf and it works:

  set -g default-terminal "xterm-256color"

BTW it matters to me when using vim as a markdown viewer (esp for github readme.md).

JdeBP3• 6 years ago

That is the wrong thing to do. The correct terminal type for tmux is either "tmux" or "tmux-256color".

Even "screen" and "screen-256color" are not perfectly correct descriptions of tmux nowadays (italics actually being a case in point); and there is no problem with importing a "tmux-256color" entry into a more-than-half-a-decade-old terminfo database. The database structure lends itself both to copying individual records and to having extra records in one's home directory.

You should not be using "xterm-" anything with tmux, or with any terminal or terminal emulator that is not actually XTerm. Indeed, this mis-use is called out right at the top of the tmux FAQ.

* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MIS-...

* https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#other_vers...

* https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/FAQ

carapace• 6 years ago

This delights my inner nerd, but my outer curmudgeon is miffed: I've fallen out of love with teletype-based UIs (not text-based UIs) and it now feels like epic "turd polishing" taken to absurd lengths.

It's 2020, italics shouldn't be hard eh?

yamaneko• 6 years ago

Mine only worked when I added [this][1]:

    set t_ZH=^[[3m
    set t_ZR=^[[23m

before `highlight Comment cterm=italic`.

I was recently wondering how I'd make some keywords italic, like VSCode, which italicizes `self.foo` and others in Python. This thread came at the right time. I found this [post][2] that may help, in combination with OP.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/21077380/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/dgbvw4/how_can_i_have_...

_bxg1• 6 years ago

I'll file this under reasons I don't use arcane terminal editors. There are so much better uses of my time.

A Definitive Guide to Enabling Italics in Vim and Tmux

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