[konsole] [Bug 387709] Konsole shouldn't turn "\e[1m" into intensive color format.

[Egmont Koblinger]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387709

--- Comment #3 from Egmont Koblinger <egmont at gmail.com> ---
> Then what's your opinion about having a option for whether to use bold font or not.

I have vaguely proposed removing it from gnome-terminal at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=762247#c1 (I wanted to link this
bugreport previously, I mistakenly linked a duplicate of this), but I don't
have a firm opinion about it.

I tend to believe that users should configure their apps not to ask to output
bold text in that case.

Many terminal emulators traditionally have an option to disable bold, and/or an
option for a "bold color" which is being used when the default foreground color
is made bold. The latter one only makes sense in spirit of the legacy "bold is
bright" model; if for the standard 8 palette colors one should be able to
specify their bold ahemm bright counterpart, they should probably be able to
specify one for the default foreground color too (which is not necessarily the
white or black one of the palette).

As for entirely disabling bold: The 256-color (let alone truecolor) extension
started to clarify that for the ambiguous "\e[1m" the correct meaning should be
bold and not bright, since the color has a dedicated escape sequence of its
own. (And while at it, "\e[2m" aka faint/dim is also a truly stupid one. A
thinner font stroke could make sense instead, although it's not a standard
typesetting practice, and its usefulness is highly questionable.)

> Maybe some users just don't like the bold fonts and want to use normal font weight
> for all cases.

If we're talking about users simply not liking it, then what about users who
don't like italic, users who don't like underlined text, users who don't like
certain colors (or combinations thereof) etc.?? Some terminal emulators provide
some options for these, e.g. some can enforce a minimum contrast between the
foreground and background color of each cell (by disobeying even explilcit RGB
foreground colors if it's too close to the background), and I guess every
emulator that supports blinking allows to disable it. And what about users
using this font in other apps too where they just as much don't like its bold
counterpart?? Maybe they should configure their system globally not to use it
(e.g. for GNOME this can probably be done at fontconfig level; not sure about
KDE). Pushing even further, I'm wondering: why would someone get rid of this
useful way of emphasizing text, rather than picking a different font whose bold
variant they also like??

That being said, if a terminal emulator lets you disable bold (or maybe choose
a different font for bold), so be it. But then at the very least it should
probably offer this for italic too. I just personally don't see too much point
in these options and I'm not convinced the terminal emulator is the right place
for such hacks.

Anyway, your original request and my response to that was more of a technical
one, this one is more opinion-based, so Konsole developers' opinion should
matter more, not mine. :-)

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