Hi all, I run a free shell service at silenceisdefeat.org. I'm looking to give it more of a BBS-like feel and bring back some of the wonderful features I enjoyed from BBS's back in the day. I plan on adding several classic BBS doors, but to start out, I want to add some BBS-like menus. The problem I'm running into is that SSH clients seem to vary with whether or not they support colors or extended characters. Does anyone know how do to color detection over SSH?

Thanks in advance,
Chris

I think the best you'll be able to do is try to detect the terminal type and make an assumption about whether or not color is available. It is certainly up to the emulator creator to determine whether to implement color or not.

AbsoluteTelnet will try to detect color escape sequences even when emulating terminals that didn't originally have color (vt100 for example).

I remember back in my BBS days, the bbs host would ask the user if their terminal supported color. Your response would then be saved along with your profile.

As for 'extended characters', I assume you mean the DOS CP437 character set, including line-draw characters and other symbols? Absolute certainly supports them, but I don't know of any way to *detect* a terminals support for this character set. Absolute has an 'ansi bbs' terminal setting that sets a lot of defaults that a BBS would require, including the CP437 character set.