It's not obscure.
One thing I actually agree with the author about is that these escape codes are the only relevant thing. Outside of retro computing nobody should care about supporting anything else.
Other programs doing this are not exactly in short supply. Anyone can do "ls --color /bin/ls | hexdump -C" and see the secret sauce.
I blog about various things, partly to help out people who are less experienced. But I don't pretend what I write about is some sort of lost art, that "only a handful of people know".
Like "how do I make bold text in linux terminal" gives as second result this:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/528928/how-to-do-underline-b..., which also links to https://misc.flogisoft.com/bash/tip_colors_and_formatting.
Searching on youtube I immediately got this, for those who prefer in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL21-EnsNjQ
And it manages to do this without the pure arrogance of "i might be one of a handful of people left on earth who actually has the knowledge".
Seriously, this whole article could just have been just:
"Q: How do I output more than just print black&white text to the terminal? A: ANSI escape codes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code"
Not "everything you wanted to know about terminals".
Like, "how does Ctrl-C work? What's flow control?". No, this post is entirely about ANSI codes.
What's extra frustrating is that you too are calling this "oldskool crowd". I'm just not that old, and this just isn't forgotten. It's simply another tool that people use when they need to solve the problem of colors, etc.
Just because many people don't know how a malloc()/new becomes a mmap or sbrk doesn't make it "oldskool". It's simply a thing that many people have not learned yet, because they haven't needed to. If and when they need to it's quite documented and many others know it, if they want more hand holding.
Like say I didn't know how garbage collectors worked. I don't go "Oh you older generation of lisp programmers, you need to blog more and teach us younglings, so that we can understand the languages that we use". Sure, blogging etc about GCs is good, but who would be arrogant enough to just write an article about "old gen and new gen" and call it "everything you ever wanted to know about GC" and claim that they are one of the handful of people who understand GCs.
