Appearance
Character Sets
Character set designation and invocation sequences from the VT100. The DEC Special Graphics set (activated with ESC ( 0) provides box-drawing characters used by legacy TUI applications for borders and frames. Modern terminals typically default to UTF-8, making explicit character set switching less common — but the DEC Special Graphics set remains widely used. DEC Special Graphics maps ASCII characters to box-drawing glyphs — q becomes ─, x becomes │. This 1978 hack is still how tmux and many TUI frameworks draw borders, even though Unicode has proper box-drawing characters.
Analysis2026-04-06
The Character Sets category covers 4 features. All 12 tested terminals achieve 100%.
Terminal Applications
| Feature | iTerm2 | Ghostty | VS Code | Warp | Cursor | Terminal.app |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DEC line drawing character set | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| DEC Special Graphics | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| G0/G1 character set switching | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| UTF-8 mode | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |