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DEC Special Graphics
The DEC Special Graphics character set provides box-drawing characters. Activate with
ESC ( 0 (designate G0 as Special Graphics), deactivate with ESC ( B (restore ASCII). When active, ASCII characters like j k l m q x render as box-drawing glyphs (corners, horizontal/vertical lines).
Used by legacy TUI applications (dialog, mc, ncurses programs) to draw borders and frames. Modern applications typically use Unicode box-drawing characters (U+2500 block) instead, but DEC Special Graphics remains relevant for environments where UTF-8 is not available.How this is testedautomated
Send
Send
\x1b(0 to designate DEC Special Graphics, write "q", send \x1b(B to restore ASCII. Verify the cell does not contain literal "q" (should be box-drawing U+2500).The same probe runs against headless backends (via Termless) and real terminal apps (via a daemon launched in each terminal). This lets us distinguish parser correctness from rendering correctness.
Analysis2026-04-06
Supported by all 12 tested terminals — universal adoption. Part of the Core TUI baseline.
Supported by 13 of 14 backends (93%)
Terminal Applications
| Terminal | Version | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iTerm2 | 3.6.9 | ✓ yes | |
| Ghostty | 1.3.1 | ✓ yes | |
| VS Code | ✓ yes | ||
| Warp | ✓ yes | ||
| Cursor | ✓ yes | ||
| Terminal.app | ✓ yes |