Ansi/Line drawing chars does not work properly in the terminal

[kalleswe]

Windows Terminal version

1.23.12811.0

Windows build number

10.0.19045.6456

Other Software

telnet.exe within command line in terminal.

Steps to reproduce

telnet to any bbs and you will see that ansi is messed up or line drawings as well. also telnet/terminal doesn't support inline zmodem which it should. please fix.

Expected Behavior

Expecting terminal to render ansi screens like this:

Actual Behavior

But instead the acucal behavior of the terminal is:

Which is totally bad.

[lhecker]

telnet to any bbs and you will see that ansi is messed up or line drawings as well.

Can you name us a specific BBS we should try? Generally speaking, these invalid characters indicate an encoding issue:

[j4james]

I think the problem here is that the telnet client that comes with Windows has its own escape sequence processor, and it's not very good. I get much better results using telnet from within a WSL shell.

I was kind of surprised actually, because I expected most BBSes would required a 437 code page, but at least some of them seem to be fine with UTF-8.

I couldn't find the Spiderman example, but here's one BBS which has a similar kind of artwork on the login screen:

telnet cqbbs.ddns.net 6800

With the Windows inbox telnet.exe it looks broken, but if you telnet from a WSL shell it looks fine.

[lhecker]

I think the problem here is that the telnet client that comes with Windows has its own escape sequence processor, and it's not very good.

[scrubbed]

The only thing I find confusing is that the internal conhost.exe repository contains a directory named "telnet" and I had assumed it's being used for this. Perhaps it was only a test project? I should suggest that we replace the old tcpip/telnet client with a modern one.

[lhecker]

I know where the telnet client code is and try to fix it. Not sure when, but I'll see if I can squeeze this in somehow.

[juliannoble]

I think the problem here is that the telnet client that comes with Windows has its own escape sequence processor, and it's not very good. I get much better results using telnet from within a WSL shell.

I was kind of surprised actually, because I expected most BBSes would required a 437 code page, but at least some of them seem to be fine with UTF-8.

I couldn't find the Spiderman example, but here's one BBS which has a similar kind of artwork on the login screen:

telnet cqbbs.ddns.net 6800

With the Windows inbox telnet.exe it looks broken, but if you telnet from a WSL shell it looks fine.

Using terminal canary 1.25.3531.0 and a custom telnet client - this BBS renders nicely - I can navigate the menus and view other ANSI images on the board, confirming it's likely an issue with the telnet.exe client.