megathread: Scrollbar Marks

[DHowett]

[Original issue: #1527][experimental PR #12948]

Marks, Scrolling to prompts, prompt markup

• FR: IDE-style marks on scrollbar #1527
• Scroll to previous/next prompt #6232
• Also related: Feature Request: Scrollable map view for each tab [minimap] #2226

⚠️ This issue has kinda become my spec in progress. It's longer than usual, instead of me just putting notes in a doc and committing it. When I do submit the spec, I'll clean this up.

Abstract

Marks are a new buffer-side feature that allow the commandline application or user to add a bit of metadata to a range of text. This can be used for marking a region of text as a prompt, marking a command as succeeded or failed, quickly marking errors in the output. These marks can then be exposed to the user as pips on the scrollbar, or as icons in the margins. Additionally, the user can quickly scroll between different marks, to allow easy navigation between important information in the buffer.

Marks in the Windows Terminal are a combination of functionality from a variety of different terminal emulators. "Marks" attmepts to unify these different, but related pieces of functionality.

Background

There's a large amount of prior art on this subject. I've attempted to collect as much as possible in the "Relevant external docs" section below. "Marks" have been used in different scenarios by different emulators for different purposes. The common thread running between them of marking a region of text in the buffer with a special meaning.

• iTerm2, ConEmu, FinalTerm et.al. support emitting a VT sequence to indicate that a line is a "prompt" line. This is often used for quick navigation between these prompts.
• FinalTerm (and xterm.js) also support marking up more than just the prompt. They go so far as to differentiate the start/end of the prompt, the start of the cmmandline input, and the start/end of the command output. FTCS_COMMAND_FINISHED is even designed to include metadata indicating whether a command succeeded or failed.
• Additionally, Terminal.app allows users to "bookmark" lines via the UI. That allows users to quickly come back to something they feel is important.
• Consider also editors like Visual Stutio. VS also uses little marks on the scrollbar to indicate where other matches are for whatever the given search term is.

Solution Design

Supported VT sequences

• iTerm2's OSC SetMark (in Experimental: add support for scrollbar marks #12948)
• FinalTerm prompt markup sequences
  • FTCS_PROMPT was added in Implement the FTCS_PROMPT sequence for marking the start of the prompt #13163
• additionally, VsCode's FinalTerm prompt markup variant
• ConEmu's OSC9;12
• Any custom OSC we may want to author ourselves.

The FinalTerm prompt sequences are probably the most complicated version of all these, so it's important to give these a special callout. Almost all the other VT sequences are roughly equivalent to FTCS_PROMPT. The xterm.js / VsCode version has additional cases, that they ironically added to work around conpty not understanding these sequences originally.

FinalTerm sequences

The relevant FinalTerm sequences for marking up the prompt are as follows:

• FTCS_PROMPT: OSC 133 ; A ST
  • The start of a prompt. Does nothing all on it's own. Internally, this sets a marker in the buffer indicating we started a prompt at the current cursor position, and that marker will be used when we get a FTCS_COMMAND_START
• FTCS_COMMAND_START: OSC 133 ; B ST
  • The start of a commandline (READ: the end of the prompt). When it follows a FTCS_PROMPT, it creates a mark in the buffer from the location of the FTCS_PROMPT to the current cursor position, with the category of prompt
• FTCS_COMMAND_EXECUTED: OSC 133 ; C ST
  • The start of the command output / the end of the commandline.
• FTCS_COMMAND_FINISHED: OSC 133 ; D ; [Ps] ST
  • the end of a command.

Same deal for the FTCS_COMMAND_EXECUTED/FTCS_COMMAND_FINISHED ones. FTCS_COMMAND_EXECUTED does nothing until we get a FTCS_COMMAND_FINISHED, and the [Ps] parameter determines the category.

• [Ps] == 0: success
• anything else: error

This whole sequence will get turned into a single mark.

When we get the FTCS_COMMAND_FINISHED, set the category of the prompt mark that preceded it, so that the prompt becomes an error or a success.

Buffer implementation

In the initial PR (#12948), marks were stored simply as a vector<Mark>, where a mark had a start and end point. These wouldn't reflow on resize, and didn't support all of the FTCS sequences.

There's ultimately three types of region here we need to mark:

• The prompt (starting from A)
• the command (starting from B)
• the output (starting from C)

That intuitively feels a bit like a text attribute almost. Additionally, the prompt should be connected to it's subsequent command and output, s.t. we can

• Select command output
• re-run command

easily. Supposedly, we could do this by iterating through the whole buffer to find the previous/next {whatever}, but that feels prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the prompt needs to be able to contain the status / category, and a 133;D needs to be able to change the category of the previous prompt/command.

If we instead do a single mark for each command, from 133;A to 133;A, and have sub-points for elements within the command

• 133;A starts a mark on the current line, at the current position.
• 133;B sets the end of the mark to the current position.
• 133;C updates the mark's commandStart to the current end, then sets the end of the mark to the current position.
• 133;D updates the mark's outputStart to the current end, then sets the end of the mark to the current position. It also updates the category of the mark, if needed.

Each command then only shows up as a single pip on the scrollbar. Jumping between commands is easy, scrollToMark operates on mark.start, which is where the prompt started. "Bookmarks", i.e. things started by the user wouldn't have commandStart or outputStart in them. Getting the text of the command, of the output is easy - it's just the text between sub-points.

Reflow still sucks though - we'd need to basically iterate over all the marks as we're reflowing, to make sure we put them into the right place in the new buffer. That is super annoying.

This also probably doesn't mesh super well with generic pattern matchers. -- Not entirely sure what I meant by this. I think there was a thought to combine the mark implementation with the URL detection / pattern matching code, but I don't think we're going to do that anymore.

Cmd.exe considerations

cmd.exe is generally a pretty bad shell, and doesn't have a lot of the same hooks that other shells do, that might allow for us to emit the FTCS_COMMAND_EXECUTED sequence. However, cmd.exe also doesn't allow multiline prompts, so we can be relatively certain that when the user presses enter, that's the end of the prompt. We may want to add a setting to auto-mark enter as the end of the prompt. We've already got that setting, sorta, with autoMarkPrompts. That would at least allow cmd.exe to emit a {command finished}{prompt start}{prompt...}{command start} in the prompt, and have us add the command executed. That's not perfect (we wouldn't be able to get error information), but it's not the worst.

Gutter icons

VsCode implements a set of gutter icons to the left of the buffer lines, to provide a UI element for exposing some quick actions to perform, powered by shell integartion.

Gutter icons don't need to implement app-level actions at all. They should be part of the control. At least, part of the UWP TermControl. These are some basic "actions" we could add to that menu. Since these are all attached to a mark anyways, we already know what mark the user interacted with, and where the start/end already is.

• Copy command:
• Copy output
• re-run command

If we do decide to allow comments in marks (ala "bookmarks"), then we could use the gutter flyout to display the comment, and maybe have the tooltip display that comment.

Showing the gutter

TODO! how do we really want to do this? Just stick it in the margin/padding? Or have it be a separate space in the "buffer" If it's in the buffer itself, we can render it with the renderer, which by all accounts, we probably should.

Actions

In addition to driving marks via the output, we will also want to support adding marks manually. These can be thought of like "bookmarks" - a user indicated region that means something to the user.

• addMark: add a mark to the buffer. If there's a selection, use place the mark covering at the selection. Otherwise, place the mark on the cursor row.
  • color: a color for the scrollbar mark. (in Experimental: add support for scrollbar marks #12948)
  • category: one of {"prompt", "error", "warning", "success", "info"}
  • dismissSelection: bool, default true. If true, dismiss the selection (if there is one) after marking it. If false, leave the text selected.
• scrollToMark
  • direction: ["first", "previous", "next", "last"] (in Experimental: add support for scrollbar marks #12948)
  • select: bool, default false. Select the text when it's scrolled to
  • Marks on scrollbar: Highlight mark on scrollToMark #13455 - highlight: bool, default false. Display a temporary highlight around the mark when scrolling to it
  • Marks on scrollbar: smarter navigation (center the mark vertically) #13449 - center or some other setting that controls how the mark is scrolled in.
    • Maybe top (current) /center (as proposed) /nearestEdge (when scrolling down, put the mark at the bottom line of viewport , up -> top line)?
  • category: flags({categories}...), default "all". Only scroll to one of the categories specified (e.g. only scroll to the previous error, only the previous prompt, or just any mark)
• clearMark: Remove any marks in the selected region (or at the cursor position) (in Experimental: add support for scrollbar marks #12948)
• clearAllMarks: Remove all the marks from the buffer. (in Experimental: add support for scrollbar marks #12948)
• addBookmark: This one's basically just addMark, but opens a prompt (like the window renamer) to add some text as a comment. Automatically populated with the selected text (if there was some).

Selecting commands & output

Inspired by a long weekend of manually copying .csv output from the Terminal to a spreadsheet, only to discover that we rejected #4588 some years ago.

• selectCommand(deirection=[prev, next]): Starting at the selection start, (or the cursor if there's no selection), select the command that starts before/after this point (exclusive). Probably shouldn't wrap around the buffer.
  • Since this will create a selection including the start of the command, performing this again will select the next command (in whatever direction).
• selectOutput(deirection=[prev, next]): same as above, but with command outputs.

A convenient workflow might be a multipleActions([selectOutput(prev), copy()]), to quickly select the previous commands output.

Per-profile settings

• autoMarkPrompts: bool, default false. (in Experimental: add support for scrollbar marks #12948)
• showFindMatchesOnScrollbar: bool, default false.
• showMarksOnScrollbar: bool or flags({categories}...) (so, "showMarksOnScrollbar": ["error", "success"]). Controls if marks should be displayed on the scrollbar. If true/all, the all marks are displayed. If false/none, then no marks are displayed. If a set of categories are provided, only display marks from those categories.
  • the bool version is (in Experimental: add support for scrollbar marks #12948)
  • The flags({categories}...) version
• showGutterIcons

UX Design

Gutter icons

TODO! - add a mockup (with xaml studio)

TODO! add a vscode screenshot

Multiple marks on the same line

When it comes to displaying marks on the scrollbar, or in the margins, the relative priority of these marks matters. Marks are given the following priority, with errors being the highest priority.

• Error
• Warning
• Success
• Prompt
• Info (default)

Scroll to mark highlighting

#13455 - how does this work with FTCS sequences? TODO!

Relevant external docs

• GREAT summary of the state of the ecosystem: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/issues/28
• https://iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html
  • OSC 1337 ; SetMark ST under "Set Mark"
  • under "Shell Integration/FinalTerm
• https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/terminal/trml135fbc26/mac
  • discusses auto-marked lines on enter/^C/^D
  • allows bookmarking lines with selection
  • bookmarks can have a name (maybe not super important)
• howtogeek.com/256548/how-to-use-marks-in-os-xs-terminal-for-easier-navigation
• scriptingosx.com/2017/03/terminal-the-marks-the-spot
• Thread with VsCode (xterm.js) implementation notes: FR: IDE-style marks on scrollbar #1527 (comment)
• xterm.js prompt markup sequences
• VsCode command tracking release notes, also Terminal shell integration
• ConEMU:

  Sequence	Description
  ESC ] 9 ; 12 ST	Let ConEmu treat current cursor position as prompt start. Useful with PS1.

Other related issues

Not necessarily marks related, but could happily leverage this functionality.

• Triggers(Including Text Strings) and Actions (internal or external calls)  #5916 and Add support for automatic replies ala VsCode #12366, which are likely to be combined into a single thread
  • Imagine a trigger that automatically detects error:.* and then marks the line
• Support EnableColorSelection in Terminal #9583
  • Imagine selecting some text, colorizing & marking it all at once
  • addMark(selection:false), above, was inspired by this.
• Feature Request: Highlight all finding #7561 (and broadly, Epic: Search v2 #3920)
  • Search results should maybe show up here on the scrollbar too.
• Marks on scrollbar: Highlight mark on scrollToMark #13455
• Marks on scrollbar: smarter navigation (center the mark vertically) #13449
• UI to Page / up and down by command + copy all output #4588
• Vscode-style sticky-scrolling but with prompts #14754

Relevant external docs

• https://iterm2.com/documentation-one-page.html#documentation-triggers.html"

Bugs

• Clearing the screen leaves marks behind
  • Make sure ED2 works to clear/move marks
  • Same with ED3
  • Clear Buffer action too.
• Circling doesn't update scrollbar
  • I think this was fixed in Implement the rest of the FTCS marks #14341, or in Show number of search results & positions of hits in scrollbar #14045
• resizing (oh my god this won't work at all)
• marks should be stored in the TextBuffer
• Marks need to have "no color" as an option, for:
  • Marks should be "default FG from the table" colored when otherwise not specified
  • Error marks should be "color table red", warning yellow, success green, when not otherwise specified

Things we may want to think about in the nearish future:

• adding a timestamp for when a line was marked?
• adding a comment to the mark. How do we display that comment? a teachingtip on the scrollbar maybe (actually that's a cool idea)
• adding a shape to the mark? Terminal.app marks prompt lines with brackets in the margins
• Marks are currently just displayed as "last one in wins", they should have a real sort order
• Should the height of a mark on the scrollbar be dependent on font size & buffer height? I think I've got it set to like, a static 2dip, but maybe it should represent the actual height of the row (down to a min 1dip)