The immediate usefulness of this is in pterm.exe: when the user uses
-e to specify a command to run in the pterm, we retrieve the command
in Unicode, store it in CONF_remote_cmd as UTF-8, and then in conpty.c
we can extract it in the same form and convert it back to Unicode to
pass losslessly to CreateProcessW. So now non-ACP Unicode works in
that part of the pterm command line.
This begins the process of enabling our Windows applications to handle
Unicode characters on their command lines which don't fit in the
system code page.
Instead of passing plain strings to cmdline_process_param, we now pass
a partially opaque and platform-specific thing called a CmdlineArg.
This has a method that extracts the argument word as a default-encoded
string, and another one that tries to extract it as UTF-8 (though it
may fail if the UTF-8 isn't available).
On Windows, the command line is now constructed by calling
split_into_argv_w on the Unicode command line returned by
GetCommandLineW(), and the UTF-8 method returns text converted
directly from that wide-character form, not going via the system code
page. So it _can_ include UTF-8 characters that wouldn't have
round-tripped via CP_ACP.
This commit introduces the abstraction and switches over the
cross-platform and Windows argv-handling code to use it, with minimal
functional change. Nothing yet tries to call cmdline_arg_get_utf8().
I say 'cross-platform and Windows' because on the Unix side there's
still a lot of use of plain old argv which I haven't converted. That
would be a much larger project, and isn't currently needed: the
_current_ aim of this abstraction is to get the right things to happen
relating to Unicode on Windows, so for code that doesn't run on
Windows anyway, it's not adding value. (Also there's a tension with
GTK, which wants to talk to standard argv and extract arguments _it_
knows about, so at the very least we'd have to let it munge argv
before importing it into this new system.)
In the Windows API, there are two places you can get a command line in
the form of a single unsplit string. One is via the command-line
parameter to WinMain(); the other is by calling GetCommandLine(). But
the two have different semantics: the WinMain command line string is
only the part after the program name, whereas GetCommandLine() returns
the full command line _including_ the program name.
PuTTY has never yet had to parse the full output of GetCommandLine,
but I have plans that will involve it beginning to do so. So I need to
make sure the utility function split_into_argv() can handle it.
This is not trivial because the quoting convention is different for
the program name than for everything else. In the program's normal
arguments, parsed by the C library startup code, the convention is
that backslashes are special when they appear before a double quote,
because that's how you write a literal double quote. But in the
program name, backslashes are _never_ special, because that's how
CreateProcess parses the program name at the start of the command
line, and the C library must follow suit in order to correctly
identify where the program name ends and the arguments begin.
In particular, consider a command line such as this:
"C:\Program Files\Foo\"foo.exe "hello \"world\""
The \" in the middle of the program name must be treated as a literal
backslash, followed by a non-literal double quote which matches the
one at the start of the string and causes the space in 'Program Files'
to be treated as part of the pathname. But the same \" when it appears
in the subsequent argument is treated as an escaped double quote, and
turns into a literal " in the argument string.
This commit adds support for this special initial-word handling in
split_into_argv(), via an extra boolean argument indicating whether to
turn that mode on. However, all existing call sites set the flag to
false, because the new mode isn't needed _yet_. So there should be no
functional change.
This makes pterm.exe support the same (very small) subset of the
standard option collection that Unix pterm does. Namely, -load (which
won't do anything useful with a hostname to connect to, but is still
useful if you have a saved session containing configuration like
colours or default size or what have you), and also -sessionlog.
To make this work, I've had to move the 'tooltype' definition out of
window.c into {putty,pterm}.c, so that it can be defined differently
in the two.
Using a new screenshot-taking module I just added in windows/utils,
these new options allow me to start up one of the tools with
demonstration window contents and automatically save a .BMP screenshot
to disk. This will allow me to keep essentially the same set of demo
images and update them easily to keep pace with the current appearance
of the real tools as PuTTY - and Windows itself - both evolve.
This commit introduces a new config option for how to handle shifted
arrow keys.
In the default mode (SHARROW_APPLICATION), we do what we've always
done: Ctrl flips the arrow keys between sending their most usual
escape sequences (ESC [ A ... ESC [ D) and sending the 'application
cursor keys' sequences (ESC O A ... ESC O D). Whichever of those modes
is currently configured, Ctrl+arrow sends the other one.
In the new mode (SHARROW_BITMAP), application cursor key mode is
unaffected by any shift keys, but the default sequences acquire two
numeric arguments. The first argument is 1 (reflecting the fact that a
shifted arrow key still notionally moves just 1 character cell); the
second is the bitmap (1 for Shift) + (2 for Alt) + (4 for Ctrl),
offset by 1. (Except that if _none_ of those modifiers is pressed,
both numeric arguments are simply omitted.)
The new bitmap mode is what current xterm generates, and also what
Windows ConPTY seems to expect. If you start an ordinary Command
Prompt and launch into WSL, those are the sequences it will generate
for shifted arrow keys; conversely, if you run a Command Prompt within
a ConPTY, then these sequences for Ctrl+arrow will have the effect you
expect in cmd.exe command-line editing (going backward or forward a
word). For that reason, I enable this mode unconditionally when
launching Windows pterm.
This fulfills our long-standing Mayhem-difficulty wishlist item
'win-command-prompt': this is a Windows pterm in the sense that when
you run it you get a local cmd.exe running inside a PuTTY-style window.
Advantages of this: you get the same free choice of fonts as PuTTY has
(no restriction to a strange subset of the system's available fonts);
you get the same copy-paste gestures as PuTTY (no mental gear-shifting
when you have command prompts and SSH sessions open on the same
desktop); you get scrollback with the PuTTY semantics (scrolling to
the bottom gets you to where the action is, as opposed to the way you
could accidentally find yourself 500 lines past the end of the action
in a real console).
'win-command-prompt' was at Mayhem difficulty ('Probably impossible')
basically on the grounds that with Windows's old APIs for accessing
the contents of consoles, there was no way I could find to get this to
work sensibly. What was needed to make it feasible was a major piece
of re-engineering work inside Windows itself.
But, of course, that's exactly what happened! In 2019, the new ConPTY
API arrived, which lets you create an object that behaves like a
Windows console at one end, and round the back, emits a stream of
VT-style escape sequences as the screen contents evolve, and accepts a
VT-style input stream in return which it will parse function and arrow
keys out of in the usual way.
So now it's actually _easy_ to get this to basically work. The new
backend, in conpty.c, has to do a handful of magic Windows API calls
to set up the pseudo-console and its feeder pipes and start a
subprocess running in it, a further magic call every time the PuTTY
window is resized, and detect the end of the session by watching for
the subprocess terminating. But apart from that, all it has to do is
pass data back and forth unmodified between those pipes and the
backend's associated Seat!
That said, this is new and experimental, and there will undoubtedly be
issues. One that I already know about is that you can't copy and paste
a word that has wrapped between lines without getting an annoying
newline in the middle of it. As far as I can see this is a fundamental
limitation: the ConPTY system sends the _same_ escape sequence stream
for a line that wrapped as it would send for a line that had a logical
\n at what would have been the wrap point. Probably the best we can do
to mitigate this is to adopt a different heuristic for newline elision
that's right more often than it's wrong.
For the moment, that experimental-ness is indicated by the fact that
Buildscr will build, sign and deliver a copy of pterm.exe for each
flavour of Windows, but won't include it in the .zip file or in the
installer. (In fact, that puts it in exactly the same ad-hoc category
as PuTTYtel, although for completely different reasons.)
