It's time to talk about my writerdeck

The short answer is that it’s presumably some vim theme that he likes, but I’d guess that the origin of that is that DOS text-based applications had a long-running convention — not always universally used — of using white text on blue, unlike the Unix convention of white on black.

You can see that persisting in things like default Midnight Commander color choices (it’s set up to look like the MS-DOS Norton Commander):

…or in Network Manager’s console-menu-based utility, nmtui. I think that the dialog package and prior to that, the newt package, both for showing curses-based menu-based interfaces, also defaulted to white-on-blue, probably for the same reason.

For the eye strain. Gotta build up those muscles.

Vibes.

I simply use more than one TTY, and emacs’ buffers.

If you haven’t yet run into emacs’s frames, you may find that useful, unless you explicitly want to also use the Linux virtual consoles for other reasons. In a GUI environment, emacs frames are normally represented by another X11/Wayland window. In a TUI environment, they look kinda like a virtual console.

Each frame contains a set of emacs windows (what a lot of present-day GUI software calls “panes”) laid out to display whatever buffers you want. You can have a buffer shown in a window in multiple frames if you want.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Frames.html

Some basic operations:

• C-x 5 2 Creates a new frame
• C-x 5 o Switches to another frame
• C-x 5 0 Destroys current frame

You can also produce a similar effect by running an emacs instance in daemon mode, and then using emacsclient to attach to that daemon instance on different Linux virtual consoles, if you prefer the multiple-VC approach. One emacs instance and set of buffers, but can have different windows in different layouts showing them and switch between them.

The answer is right there in the fist paragraph, and in more detail if you read the whole article.

The author uses kmscon, that is a usermode console with proper graphics drivers, hi res rendering, and UTF8 font support. There is no desktop environment used.

I suspect that is where the italics support is coming from. Makes me want to try it out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kmscon

suggesting the Vim instance is running in a full-screen terminal emulator under some windowing system or another.

Courtesy of this post, here’s a test script to show a terminal’s capabilities:

#!/bin/bash
echo -e "\e[1mbold\e[0m"
echo -e "\e[3mitalic\e[0m"
echo -e "\e[3m\e[1mbold italic\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"

I thought that it might be them using fbterm (a more-sophisticated userspace framebuffer virtual terminal emulator that’s an alternative to fbcon, the built-in Linux kernel virtual terminal emulator), but at least on my system, fbterm doesn’t seem to show italics.

EDIT: Ah, saw @[email protected]’s comment about kmscon. It looks like they’re using kmscon, a different userspace framebuffer virtual terminal emulator, and explicitly say so in the article.

EDIT2: If you install it, looks like on Debian it gets used by default on next boot as the new console virtual terminal emulator. Note that unlike fbcon and fbterm, you apparently need to use Control-Alt-FKey rather than just Alt-Fkey to switch terminals when you’re inside kmscon, same as if you’re in Xorg or Wayland.

I’m surprised vim supports italics. Is there any terminal standard for that, like colors and bold text?