Add some colour and Unicode to your terminal games!

Impetus

Whilst being terrible at it, I find the concept of roguelikes quite intriguing, namely because they were designed to be played from the terminal.

However, "modern" terminal games don't take advantage of two capabilities provided by X11 terminals (viz. (u)xterm and gnome-terminal):

• 256-colour(ish) palette; and
• Unicode support.

But from an admittedly brief survey, it doesn't seem that many people use these. The only reason I can imagine for this is to keep with the status quo and maintain super portability.

There are lots of otherwise useless wingdings and box-drawing glyphs in Unicode. We need to give them some love.

Prior Art

• Roguelike Development has a page on Unicode in roguelikes.
  • It mentions that using Unicode would free us from extended ASCII, but not much about games that depend on to do stuff extended ASCII can't. For example, diagonal walls.
• There's a Nethack Unicode patch, but it's pretty much just a sed for ASCII → Unicode and char → wchar_t. Not a trivial task to be sure, but not what we're looking for either.

Problems

• Real Linux consoles (the Ctrl+Alt+Fx kind) don't support colour, nor Unicode (according to very brief test).
• Requires more effort.
• Font support for all Unicode is sketchy.