It is interesting how the world has historically varied on this, and what the default out of the box settings are.

Visual bells were the rage because they worked well with GUI terminal emulators, and didn't bog a real terminal down with waiting until the sound had finished before it accepted the next bit of output. They were also friendly to one's neighbours sitting on the next desk. (-:

And indeed on #NetBSD for example there's the whole wsbell(4) thing and the idea that a machine doesn't necessarily *have* a tinny speaker to make beeps, because it isn't necessarily a descendant of an IBM PC/XT.

In contrast, Microsoft Windows wants to play sounds seemingly at the drop of a hat; and the ethos has been over the years that all personal computers since at least the PC98 times have sound cards (or mainboard equivalents) and speakers and users always want sounds on, out of the box.

#MicrosoftTerminal defaults to noises rather than flashes.

#ComputerHistory

Tradeoffs.

Microsoft Terminal does italics, strikethrough, and invisible properly, but it does underlining at the glyph baseline, making some characters difficult to read.

MobaXTerm's built-in PuTTY places underlining properly *under* the glyphs, but does not handle italics, strikethrough, and invisible at all.

#MicrosoftTerminal #TerminalEmulators #putty #MobaXTerm

Microsoft Terminal goes badly wrong when REP is combined with characters outwith the BMP. Microsoft Terminal Preview is better, but still goes wrong sometimes when (as in the second image here on the bottom scrollbar) told to REP a character.

#MicrosoftTerminal #MouseText #Unicode #ECMA48

Stricly speaking, #Unscii isn't providing true italics here. It is, rather, being faked with an oblique slant, which isn't the same.

Notice how the transform used gives different heights to the letters 'n' and 'm', making the italicized word "filename" look uneven.

Oblique is an inferior substitute for a properly italicized font, where the italic letters actually have different shapes to the upright ones, and aren't simply toppled-over versions of them.

#MicrosoftTerminal

Switching Microsoft Terminal to #Unscii produces better results.

#MicrosoftTerminal allows me to pick Unscii 16, whereas MobaXTerm forced the use of Unscii 8 and didn't allow Unscii 16 as an option at all.

Microsoft Terminal also handles more text styles, including italics, invisible, and overline.

It even clearly distinguishes font weights in reverse video mode.