> A de-facto standard is not a standard. It's an opinion.

OK. Let's look what happened some of these opinions.

- PDF became two different ISO standards.
- USB started as a de facto charging port, became de jure in EU.
- DMX, MIDI, DE-9 RS232 connectors are all de-facto standards, but used as de-jure now.
- Tons of file formats in scientific and engineering computing is in fact de-facto standards, yet they flourish.

So, it's meaningless whether a standard is de-facto or de-jure. If it looks/walks/sounds like a duck, it's a duck.

> I suggest you go plug a VGA cable into a DisplayPort and see what happens.

I use something similar to this [0]. It works.

> The horrible hack is saving you and the few other very loud people that use it hours of work.

I love how you liberally throw the h-word around. Because horrible hacks became conventions over history. Vi's latency hiding can be considered "a horrible hack", or "brilliant" depending on the perspective. Same can be said for HDMI for example. Piggybacking on DVI for video signalization, adding a couple of digital lanes for sound and Ethernet, it can be considered a horrible hack, yet it's a de-jure industry standard. IOW, someone's opinion, just in a written form with some stamps and a logo.

From my vantage point, people not using terminal multiplexers (tmux/screen) are a shrinking minority, yet from your perspective it's the opposite. Considering the oh gawd horrible terminal multiplexers are still maintained, and I still initiate people on screen or show them tmux as a screen alternative, I don't see they're going anywhere. Your perspective may differ. I'm mostly talking about younger generations, I may add.

> I for instance have been using remote servers for 40 years without ever needing a multiplexer.

I think you're lucky for not having to debug things on the go, for days, or managing servers on a responsive and stable network. I sometimes have no luxuries, so I have to use horrible, horrible hacks to get things done. It works brilliantly unfortunately. Shame on me.

> I rejected when I first came across them and that have been a drag on the entire terminal ecosystem for 30 years.

That's a long grudge to hold. I'm sure it's not the only one. Think about your health. No it's not meant to snark. I'm honest.

> Thankfully they are finally on their way out, thanks to a new generation of terminal emulators and are using the tty the way it was designed to be used.

I don't see it's happening, sorry. What I see is more hacks are piled upon hacks. Some might stick and become standards, some might die.

> Granted currently only WezTerm provides such a multiplexer...

Wezterm's multiplexer is a regular old multiplexer which connects to a remote wezterm instance. IOW, just a different transport which encapsulates a WezTerm instance. There's nothing magic here. It's moving the hack to another layer. Now there are two transports, and Wezterm's one is not interoperable with others. So it's a really horrible hack from my perspective. If something is not interoperable with other tools, then it's out for me. I can't be bothered to install Wezterm to all and every server I work with. Which is >1000.

Unfortunately, I have the luxury of choosing the terminal which I want to work with in any circumstance. As long as I can connect to my remote server, my persistent workspace is there. I don't need a local Wezterm to be able to work.

> ...without a horrible hack in the middle.

Wezterm puts the horrible hack on top. Like a cherry. Bright and eye-catching, in a bad way.

> As for multiplxers[sic] playing along, here you go: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1391

I read the bug report. I think the problem is the approach. If somebody is so adamant in a feature, and the maintainer doesn't want to add that feature, a) you can patch it yourself, b) you can fork and patch it yourself. It's free software. The tmux maintainers doesn't owe you anything. I bet, if you send in a nice patch, they won't ghost/reject you.

BTW, a mux is just another terminal emulator inside your terminal. It's not more of an hack compared to an ncurses window, or old graphic interfaces in UNIX systems.

> Oh and on SGR it is an ECMA standard, only in the breach.

Many standards are flexed. Many graphics cards do not fit inside the PCIe mechanical standard, for example, but they work.

> For example, color support as it is actually used in terminals violates the so called specification.

My terminal has fallbacks for a lot of modes. This is what backwards compatibility is for.

> Complete and utter drag on the ecosystem.

Sorry I don't see/feel it for the last 20 years.

So, in short, I agree to disagree, and genuinely wish more power to you in your endeavors. There are no hard feelings here, just tone-matching.

Hope to have a longer chat and have the opportunity to learn from each other.

Cheers!

[0]: https://media.startech.com/cms/products/gallery_large/dp2vga...