Mitchell Hashimoto • 10/2/2023

Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators

This technical article delves into how terminal emulators handle character rendering, focusing on the challenge of grapheme clusters (like multi-codepoint emojis). It explains the historical use of fixed cell grids and the wcwidth function, and why they fail with modern Unicode characters, leading to inconsistent cursor spacing. The post is aimed at terminal emulator and TUI developers, providing insights for achieving correct, consistent text display.

0 comments

#terminal emulators #character encoding #unicode