Previously Alacritty was using two different ways to reference lines in
the terminal. Either a `usize`, or a `Line(usize)`. These indexing
systems both served different purposes, but made it difficult to reason
about logic involving these systems because of its inconsistency.
To resolve this issue, a single new `Line(i32)` type has been
introduced. All existing references to lines and points now rely on
this definition of a line.
The indexing starts at the top of the terminal region with the line 0,
which matches the line 1 used by escape sequences. Each line in the
history becomes increasingly negative and the bottommost line is equal
to the number of visible lines minus one.
Having a system which goes into the negatives allows following the
escape sequence's indexing system closely, while at the same time making
it trivial to implement `Ord` for points.
The Alacritty UI crate is the only place which has a different indexing
system, since rendering and input puts the zero line at the top of the
viewport, rather than the top of the terminal region.
All instances which refer to a number of lines/columns instead of just a
single Line/Column have also been changed to use a `usize` instead. This
way a Line/Column will always refer to a specific place in the grid and
no confusion is created by having a count of lines as a possible index
into the grid storage.
This adds support for hints, which allow opening parts of the visual
buffer with external programs if they match a certain regex.
This is done using a visual overlay triggered on a specified key
binding, which then instructs the user which keys they need to press to
pass the text to the application.
In the future it should be possible to supply some built-in actions for
Copy/Pasting the action and using this to launch text when clicking on
it with the mouse. But the current implementation should already be
useful as-is.
Fixes#2792.
Fixes#2536.
Christian Duerr