Escape sequences don't work inside lua dialogs

[Astronavigator]

Supporting of such escape sequences would be very useful inside lua dialogs:

echo -e "\e[1mbold\e[0m"
echo -e "\e[3mitalic\e[0m"
echo -e "\e[4munderline\e[0m"
echo -e "\e[9mstrikethrough\e[0m"
echo -e "\e[31mHello World\e[0m"
echo -e "\x1B[31mHello World\e[0m"

It is needed to change style and color of text inside dialog widgets like ui.listbox(), inside dialog captions etc.

[mooffie]

Embedding such sequences in the text is problematic for two reasons:

• Most widgets need to know the length of the text (e.g., a dialog needs to center the title), or to be able to take a substring of it (e.g., if there's horizontal scrolling and the beginning/end of the text is out of view), and the escape sequences interfere with these calculations: the widgets will have to know to parse them in order to know to skip them.
• These sequences aren't portable.

Nevertheless, I certainly agree with you that sometimes there'a a need to make some UI elements stand out. I don't think we can ever convince mc's maintainers to add support for this (too much work, and this adds complications), but here are a few workarounds I use:

For listboxes:

• You can prefix with *, or some similar method, items you want to flag:

http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/recently-visited-files.png

• Or you can simulate columns:

http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/snapshots.png

• Or, if you need a very specialized listbox, you can implement it yourself, as in:

http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/visren.png

For labels:

• Use ui.ExtLabel instead of ui.Label. It's a label that has a style attribute. You need to do require('samples.ui.extlabel') first. See it in action (showing a red message) here:

http://www.typo.co.il/~mooffie/mc-lua/docs/html/images/screenshots/access-warning.png

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inside dialog captions etc.

BTW, why would you want to do that? If you want to call the user's attention to a dialog, do dlg.colorset = "alarm".