8.1 Terminals

Ponysay works perfectly on xterm, xterm like terminals including putty, settings may however need to be customised for Unicode Character Set (UCS) support, but less well, depending on font, on VTE based terminals including mate-terminal.

On Linux’s native terminal Linux VT (TTY) it works less well, and not good at all without Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) support. See https://github.com/erkin/ponysay/issues/1 for more information. ponysay clears the screen before printing to TTY, this is because if your graphics driver supports KMS, the colours will be messed by when the ponies position moves on the screen, this is also reason why the output is truncated on the height in TTY by default.

Most terminals have support for 256 colours, we do however only use the top 240 colours; this is because the lower 16 colours are usually, in contrast to the top 240, customised. We assume that the top 240 colours have their standard values. In TTY with KMS support we dot have any actual limit (except for 2^{24} + full transparency.)

ponysay works perfectly on xterm, urxvt and putty, but rxvt, mrxvt and Eterm do not have UTF-8 support and are currently not supported. Additionally aterm have neither UTF-8 support nor 256 colour support, and is therefore not yet supported.

Due to extreme limitations in 9term ponysay will never be able to run on it.