Emoji Support?

[arnemileswinter]

Hello, it's me again :)

Sorry again for confusing your API last time, cool new Repository layout however!

I was testing Emoji support, because i wanted to build a Tui-enabled version of my other project: https://github.com/arnemileswinter/jungle-chess

However, using, for example, '⭕' for a termbox cell resulted in this cell being empty - also my bg color property is ignored, the cell just turns invisible. Classic ascii works.
I've used TB.cell ... (TB.Char ...) for this.

I didn't open the issue on the mother-project because i didn't get to test it on frontends other than haskell yet.

Thanks in advance!

[mitchellwrosen]

Hello User! :) I was hoping you would turn up some time, but I archived the old repo and could not comment again on mitchellwrosen/termbox-banana#3

I believe the behavior you are seeing is documented on Cell:

If the character is not 1 character wide, it will not be displayed.

We just call wcwidth from <wchar.h> on the given character, and if it's not 1, we throw that input away (rather than throw an error, or something).

The rationale for this was essentially just to simplify the model of a scene, which is a 2d grid of 1x1 cells. It's much easier to make a function that "draws a string" in user-space by getting the column arguments from zip [col..], e.g.:

string :: Int -> [Char] -> Termbox.Scene
string row cs =
  let f (col, c) = Termbox.cell Termbox.Pos{row,col} (Termbox.char c)
  in foldMap f (zip [0..] cs)

That said, it'd probably be better to replace wide characters with ' ' so that at least setting their background works, and perhaps it'd be better still to go back on that decision; certainly a "power-user" trying to draw wide characters ought to be able to, no? :)

[arnemileswinter]

Thanks for the explanation!

Ah, character width issue makes sense. I just tried with more classic symbols:

works like a charm.

ty!

[mitchellwrosen]

Oh, sweet! I think I'll reopen this issue just to mull over whether we should actually support wide characters after all. I'm leaning towards yes.

[mitchellwrosen]

(Is that yellow thing in the bottom right of your screenshot intentional?)

[arnemileswinter]

It's the keyboard controlled cursor :)

[mitchellwrosen]

I've begun work on termbox2 bindings, which support emojis out of the box.