A simple question with an easy answer: how many characters long is your terminal in full screen? I am working on a torrent searching script, and I am interested in the statistical max dimensions of a terminal. Thanks in advance.

  • TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml
    8·
    1 day ago

    If you’re writing software for Linux terminal that needs more than 80x25 you absolutely need to use some kind of scrolling.

    Do not require more rows and columns than the standard. You will be causing yourself a bunch of headaches as everyone asks you why their specific terminal is breaking in a unique way and then you’ll have to explain in every bug or crash report why you couldn’t just use curses like a normal person.

    Also it’s rude. If you’re targeting more than 80x25 you’re not writing for the terminal.

    A long time ago when I wrote a script to do something like this I had two “pages”, one of which had the important stuff and the other with the things that didn’t matter all the time like all the different dates and tracker fqdn etc. if I had to do it over again I’d use ncurses.

    • christos@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      24 hours ago

      I appreciate the time you dedicated to answer. I was hoping for a number as an answer to a simple question.

        • christos@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          23 hours ago

          No worries, I am just trying to estimate how much I need to truncate the torrent names to be functional for the average user.

          Just to give you an idea:

          https://media.kafeneio.social/media_attachments/files/117/281/634/809/361/549/original/47c5952c608d5b7a.png

            • christos@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              1·
              22 hours ago

              there is a simple read after the table, so no, it is drawn once. I trid to put a cursor on it, but felt unresponsive and lagging, thus read , kept simple

              • TrollAccount69@lemmy.ml
                3·
                22 hours ago

                I wouldn’t worry about it then. If it just spits out a table and lands the user back at their command prompt then you can rely on standard output handling in their environment.

                400x100 fullscreen xterm ppl will be happy with that, 80x25 default modeliners will know how to handle it and you won’t even get complaints from the tmux people.

                Maybe limit each column to 40 characters. If your torrent titles have more than 40 characters of preamble it’s time to switch release groups…