Control Windows Terminal with Xterm Control Sequences?

[wnpaul]

I notice that Windows Terminal identifies itself as xterm-256color. However, I cannot get it to respond to Xterm control sequences as output by xtermcontrol (https://thrysoee.dk/xtermcontrol/). This is both when running Cygwin bash and when running bash in any WSL distribution.

Cygwin's Mintty on the other hand responds properly, as do terminal progams like xterm and rxvt, running either under Cygwin or any WSL distro.

Is this simply not possible, or does it need to be enabled somewhere?

[DHowett]

It largely depends on exactly what you're trying to do. There's upwards of a hundred control sequences with heaps of different behaviors.

Can you be more specific about what's failing? That might help us point you in the right direction 😄

(NOTE: cygwin <= 3.1 eats control sequences and does not pass them through to the terminal.)

[wnpaul]

Thank you for your prompt response. Specifically what I need to do is control foreground and background color, title, and font.
I don't think Cygwin eats them (I am on 3.1.6) because it works with Cygwin mintty, xterm and urxvt.
Likewise, running it in WSL ubuntu 20.04 it also does not work in Windows Terminal but does work in mintty and when displaying either xterm or rxvt to Cygwin/X.

[DHowett]

Ah, interesting. We're not intending on supporting font selection, but colors should work.

Are you using the X11 color names (antique lace 3 and the like?)

When I use RGB, all of those things work including the title.

The title is immediately reset by my shell prompt pre-command, however, so above I've used a sleep to suppress it for a sec.

[wnpaul]

Thank you. I was using black and white in my tests, will try the rgb syntax in the morning.
Font is not nearly as important to me, geometry (size) and title are.

[DHowett]

That's really useful info. Okay, so:

• Color sequences - we're tracking adding support for named colors and more formats in Support more OSC color formats #3715. This is already in review at Add support for more OSC color formats #7578!
• Window manipulation/geometry - we're not certain it makes sense in a terminal with split panes (or even one with multiple tabs!), but it's under active discussion in Terminal: add support for Window Manipulation (CSI t, resize), or reject it explicitly (and force a client resize) #5094
• Querying colors/title - Support querying the colors via OSC #3718
• Cursor color, setting/resetting/clearing - OSC 12 cursor colour update doesn't appear to be working #7102
• Reverting colors - Support resetting the colors via OSC 104, 110, 111... #3719

I'll close this as a duplicate of those above. Sorry about not being quite so robust!