Italic comments seem to be rendering illegibily

[oceanlewis]

Summary

It looks like a number of themes display commands as italic; which renders quite poorly on my machine. I've tried this out in Wezterm, and iTerm which displays this behavior (however Alacritty is fine). I think it's probably related to how fonts are being rendered; but I am not sure.

Does someone know more about why this might be?

Here's some screens comparing italics vs non italics

Wezterm Italics

Wezterm Non-Italics

Alacritty Italics

Alacritty Non-Italics

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

1. hx

I expected this to happen:

Instead, this happened:

Helix log

~/.cache/helix/helix.log

please provide a copy of `~/.cache/helix/helix.log` here if possible, you may need to redact some of the lines

Platform

macOS

Terminal Emulator

wezterm 20230408-112425-69ae8472 ++ alacritty 0.12.0

Helix Version

helix 23.05

[the-mikedavis]

Are you using tmux? See https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/FAQ#i-dont-see-italics-or-italics-and-reverse-are-the-wrong-way-round, #3099

[oceanlewis]

I most definitely am!

[oceanlewis]

Wow, that was a rabbit hole, thank you for sharing this! Turns out that simply setting tmux's default terminal to tmux-256color was not sufficient to fix this case for me. I also needed an up-to-date infocmp in my PATH so that the proper escape codes could be emitted.

Tested with TERM=tmux-256color infocmp -1 | grep -E 'ritm|sitm' with the system's default which doesn't recognize tmux-256color and once I installed (with Nix, I haven't tried this with Homebrew or Macports) with the latest ncurses library installed in my system's environment which DOES recognize tmux-256color.

While this does seem like a tmux thing I've run into, I'm curious why Alacritty isn't affected by this behavior.

[oceanlewis]

For those looking at this, if you're running on macOS like I am; you can see that your system infocmp can't work with tmux-256color by running TERM=tmux-256color /usr/bin/infocmp -1 | grep -E 'ritm|sitm'

If you run which infocmp and get this same path you may have a way out by installing ncurses globally like I did (which also brought with it a newer version of infocmp)