width

width

The width package helps you manage string widths

When writing code that wants to print things to a terminal while formatting those things using escape sequences, often you want to keep track of the width of the thing you've printed, so you can do things like word breaking, line wrapping, or alignment.

The width package aims to be the basic block for solving that family of problems.

At its core there's just an interface,

type StringWidther interface {
	String() string
	Width() int
}

and two implementations of that thing: a bare String type that just uses go-runewidth, and an explicit StringAndWidth that lets you set both things by hand. This is enough for most things.

At some point this library might go beyond that looking at actual widths for some currently poorly-supported corner cases (i.e. cases where runewidth and your terminal disagree). So far just ingoring that issue has solved most problems (e.g. VTE in Ubuntu 16.04 mangles emoji widths, but nobody cares about it any more).