NAME
Term::Detect::Software - Detect terminal (emulator) software and its capabilities
VERSION
version 0.11
SYNOPSIS
use Term::Detect::Software qw(detect_terminal detect_terminal_cached);
my $res = detect_terminal();DESCRIPTION
This module uses several heuristics to find out what terminal (emulator) software the current process is running in, and its capabilities/settings. This module complements other modules such as Term::Terminfo and Term::Encoding.
FUNCTIONS
detect_terminal() => HASHREF
Return a hashref containing information about running terminal (emulator) software and its capabilities/settings. Return empty hashref if not detected running under termina (i.e. $ENV{TERM} is undef).
Detection method is tried from the easiest/cheapest (e.g. checking environment variables) or by looking at known process names in the process tree (using the pstree command). Terminal capabilities is determined using heuristics.
Currently Konsole and Konsole-based terminals (like Yakuake) can be detected through existence of environment variables KONSOLE_DBUS_SERVICE or KONSOLE_DBUS_SESSION. xterm is detected through XTERM_VERSION. XFCE's Terminal is detected using COLORTERM. The other software are detected via known process names.
Terminal capabilities and settings are currently determined via heuristics. Probing terminal configuration files might be performed in the future.
Result:
emulator_engine => STR
Possible values: konsole, xterm, gnome-terminal, rxvt, pterm (PuTTY), xvt, windows (CMD.EXE), cygwin.
emulator_software => STR
Either: xfce4-terminal, guake, gnome-terminal, mlterm, lxterminal, rxvt, mrxvt, putty, xvt, windows (CMD.EXE).
w=item * color_depth => INT
Either 0 (does not support ANSI color codes), 16, 256, or 16777216 (2**24).
default_bgcolor => STR (6-hexdigit RGB)
For example, any xterm is assumed to have white background (ffffff) by default, while Konsole is assumed to have black (000000). Better heuristics will be done in the future.
unicode => BOOL
Whether terminal software supports Unicode/wide characters. Note that you should also check encoding, e.g. using Term::Encoding.
box_chars => BOOL
Whether terminal supports box-drawing characters.
detect_terminal_cached([$flag]) => ANY
Just like detect_terminal() but will cache the result. Can be used by applications or modules to avoid repeating detection process.
FAQ
What is this module for? Why not Term::Terminfo or Term::Encoding?
This module is first written for Text::ANSITable so that the module can provide good defaults when displaying formatted and colored tables, especially on popular terminal emulation software like Konsole (KDE's default terminal), gnome-terminal (GNOME's default), Terminal (XFCE's default), xterm, rxvt.
The module works by trying to figure out the terminal emulation software because the information provided by Term::Terminfo and Term::Encoding are sometimes not specific enough. For example, Term::Encoding can return utf-8 when running under rxvt, but since the software currently lacks Unicode support we shouldn't display Unicode characters. Another example is color depth: Term::Terminfo currently doesn't recognize Konsole's 24bit color support and only gives max_colors 256.
TODO
Better detection of terminal emulator's background color
By peeking into its configuration.
SEE ALSO
AUTHOR
Steven Haryanto <stevenharyanto@gmail.com>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 2013 by Steven Haryanto.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.