ansi escape sequences and line wrapping

[Petar Bogdanovic]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 02:26:45PM +0100, Marc Lehmann wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 02:01:40PM +0100, Petar Bogdanovic <petar at smokva.net> wrote:
> > But why does the colouring depend on the position?
> 
> Your question is illogical

Like the rest of my mail, yes. :)

When thinking of the virtual terminal as a `real' hardware terminal, a
lot of lights go on, especially concerning the background colour.

>From this new perspective, I find it remarkable, that setting the
background colour with a command like:

	echo -n '^[[44m'

only changes the background colour of a few characters (the bash
prompt). The more I type, the more gets blue and as soon as I do a
backspace or try to resize the terminal, the whole line gets blue.

What I would expect (and I'm probably wrong here too, but hopefully not
_that_ wrong) is, that my whole terminal turns blue as soon as it reads
the control sequence `^[[44m'. I can achieve this, however, by pressing
<enter> until I reach the bottom of the terminal where it starts to
generate `new' blue lines or simply by clearing the screen with `clear'.

Maybe thats the way the old VT100 works..?