DEC Special Graphics

Category: charsets · Tags: VT100 · Specification ↗

The DEC Special Graphics character set provides box-drawing characters. Activate with ESC ( 0 (designate G0 as Special Graphics), deactivate with ESC ( B (restore ASCII). When active, ASCII characters like j k l m q x render as box-drawing glyphs (corners, horizontal/vertical lines). Used by legacy TUI applications (dialog, mc, ncurses programs) to draw borders and frames. Modern applications typically use Unicode box-drawing characters (U+2500 block) instead, but DEC Special Graphics remains relevant for environments where UTF-8 is not available.

Supported by 6 of 6 backends (100%)

Support Matrix

Backend	Version	Support	Notes
Alacritty	0.26.0	✓ yes
Ghostty	1.3.1	✓ yes
Kitty	0.40.0	✓ yes
vt100	0.1.0	✓ yes
WezTerm	0.1.0-fork.5	✓ yes
xterm.js	5.5.0	✓ yes

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