Aside from the most hardcore, I guess everyone uses terminals with some measure of utf-8 support. So why not take advantage of that? radare2 sure does. So this is how radare2 reflines (lines pointing to code jumps etc) look out of the box -
[0x000036de]> pd 7
,=< 0x000036de 0f84c50d0000 je 0x44a9
| 0x000036e4 83f803 cmp eax, 3
,==< 0x000036e7 740f je 0x36f8
|| 0x000036e9 83e801 sub eax, 1
,===< 0x000036ec 0f8416090000 je 0x4008
||| 0x000036f2 ff1588c52100 call qword [reloc.abort_128]
|`--> 0x000036f8 c70536dc2100. mov dword [0x00221338], 0
Not too pretty, right? That’s because r2 doesn’t assume utf-8 support. However, it has a handy
config variable that can help us out here - e scr.utf8, which is set to false by default. Let’s
try enabling it.
[0x000036de]> e scr.utf8 = true
[0x000036de]> pd 7
┌─< 0x000036de 0f84c50d0000 je 0x44a9
│ 0x000036e4 83f803 cmp eax, 3
┌──< 0x000036e7 740f je 0x36f8
││ 0x000036e9 83e801 sub eax, 1
┌───< 0x000036ec 0f8416090000 je 0x4008
│││ 0x000036f2 ff1588c52100 call qword [reloc.abort_128]
│└──> 0x000036f8 c70536dc2100. mov dword [0x00221338], 0
Now isn’t that much better to look at? But that’s not enough now, is it? xvilka posted an issue
recently (#8586) about adding curved corners to
reflines, like in tig. And so I took that up, and added another config variable for it,
scr.utf8.curvy. Let’s see what we get by setting that to true.
Note: for this to work, you need to also have e scr.utf8 = true.
[0x000036de]> e scr.utf8.curvy = true
[0x000036de]> pd 7
╭─< 0x000036de 0f84c50d0000 je 0x44a9
│ 0x000036e4 83f803 cmp eax, 3
╭──< 0x000036e7 740f je 0x36f8
││ 0x000036e9 83e801 sub eax, 1
╭───< 0x000036ec 0f8416090000 je 0x4008
│││ 0x000036f2 ff1588c52100 call qword [reloc.abort_128]
│╰──> 0x000036f8 c70536dc2100. mov dword [0x00221338], 0
Not much, yeah, but that corners are curved. That’s still kinda cool-looking, isn’t it?