As I work more with the terminal I wanted to check the news once in a while without grabbing my phone. This is a command line viewer for the Dutch NOS teletekst. It can be used in a command line mode where each command shows the page asked for. Alternatively it has an interactive mode where typing three numbers moves you to another page.
Use this program within your favorite terminal screen, if you omit the page number it defaults to 100 or whatever specified in the config file (see below):
$ tt 200
See -h or --help for the use of the application:
usage: tt [-v] [-h] [-i] [-r] [-b] [-d] [PAGE]
Teletext viewer (Dutch NOS pages)
positional arguments:
PAGE page to view
options:
-v, --version show version and exit
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-i, --interactive interactive mode (full screen)
-r [N], --reload [N] reload page every N seconds in interactive mode
-b, --block use ANSI block characters instead of legacy blockchar
-d, --dot use braille characters instead of legacy blockchar
Your default options use a config file ~/.config/tt.ini:
[defaults]
page = 101
#mode = block
#mode = dot
mode = legacy
#interactive = true
#reload = 5
In interactive mode the following keys can be used:
q- quit0-9- go to page (enter an number between 100 and 999)r|c|y|g- the red, cyan, yellow and green buttons- down|up - previous or next subpage
Below two screenshots, left the default legacy character support in a WezTerm terminal, right using the dot option:
Not many terminal fonts have the legacy (teletext) 2x3 block characters available (Unicode range 1FB00-1FBFF, Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement). In WezTerm you can use the anti_alias_custom_block_glyphs = true setting so Wezterm self renders the block glyphs an does not depend on the fonts supporting it.
When using a font that does not support the legacy block characters the -b (--block) or -d (--dot) option can be used. The block option uses the broader supported 2x2 block characters (Unicode range: 2580–259F, Block Elements) while the dot option uses the 2x4 braille dots (Unicode range 2800–28FF, Braille Patterns).
To check whether the fonts on the system support the given area block you can use the following commands:
$ fc-match -s monospace
$ fc-match --format='%{charset}\n' OpenSans
If there is not a specific font available (I am still waiting for NerdFonts support, see issue #1301) then install it from the following repo:
$ wget https://github.com/dokutan/legacy_computing-font/archive/refs/heads/master.zip
$ unzip legacy_computing-font-master.zip
$ cd legacy_computing-font-master
$ fontforge -c 'Open($1); Generate($2)' LegacyComputing.sfd LegacyComputing.otf
$ cp LegacyComputing.otf ~/.local/share/fonts/.
$ fc-match --format='%{charset}\n' LegacyComputing
1fb00-1fb92 1fb94-1fbca 1fbf0-1fbf9
Now xterm uses that font automatically as fallback although the glyphs leave spaces between them.
Just copy the script to your ~/.local/bin directory or /usr/bin for a system-wide installation. Please note this is just a script, not an 'application'. The intention was always to keep it as a self contained script as short as possible (not more than 400 LOC, most lines in character mapping). See the import statements for the libraries needed.