Appearance
DECSERA — selective erase rectangular area
CSI Pt ; Pl ; Pb ; Pr $ {DECSERA (
CSI Pt ; Pl ; Pb ; Pr $ {) is the selective-erase variant of DECERA: it erases unprotected characters within the rectangle but leaves any cell marked with the DECSCA character protection attribute intact. This is the rectangular companion to DECSED (selective erase in display). On VT420-era hardware, form designers used DECSCA to protect field labels and DECSERA to clear input fields between records without disturbing the form structure.How this is testedautomated
Write text across multiple rows, send
Write text across multiple rows, send
\x1b[1;1;3;5${ (selective erase rows 1-3, cols 1-5), verify the sequence is consumed without the literal characters appearing.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 9 tested terminals — universal adoption. Part of the Unicode baseline.
Supported by 8 of 14 backends (57%)
Terminal Applications
| Terminal | Version | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iTerm2 | 3.6.9 | ✓ yes | sequence consumed |
| Ghostty | 1.3.1 | ✓ yes | sequence consumed |
| VS Code | ✓ yes | ||
| Warp | ✓ yes | ||
| Cursor | ✓ yes | ||
| Terminal.app | ✓ yes |
Headless Backends
Parser correctness only — a ✓ means the parser accepts the sequence.
| Backend | Version | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alacritty | 0.26.0 | ✗ no | VT420 rectangular area operations not implemented — legacy DEC features omitted by most modern terminals |
| Kitty | 0.40.0 | ✗ no | VT420 rectangular area operations not implemented — legacy DEC features omitted by most modern terminals |
| vt100.js | 0.2.1 | ✗ no | VT420 rectangular area operations not implemented — legacy DEC features omitted by most modern terminals |
| vterm | 0.2.0 | ✗ no | VT420 rectangular area operations not implemented — legacy DEC features omitted by most modern terminals |
| WezTerm | 0.1.0-fork.5 | ✗ no | VT420 rectangular area operations not implemented — legacy DEC features omitted by most modern terminals |
| xterm.js | 5.5.0 | ✗ no | VT420 rectangular area operations not implemented — legacy DEC features omitted by most modern terminals |