# feat: add WithoutCaps() for disabling specific terminal caps

[mikeschinkel]

feat: add WithoutCaps() program option for disabling specific terminal capabilities

Depends on: charmbracelet/ultraviolet#100 — DisableCaps() must be merged first, then the ultraviolet dependency updated via go get and go mod tidy.

Summary

• Add WithoutCaps(...uv.Capability) program option so developers can selectively disable terminal capabilities that cause rendering issues on specific terminals
• Capabilities are applied to the renderer on initialization and preserved across renderer resets

Motivation

Some terminal emulators report a standard TERM value (e.g. xterm-256color) while not correctly implementing all the capabilities that implies. Currently there is no way for a Bubble Tea application to selectively disable specific rendering optimizations — the only workaround is overriding TERM to a less capable terminal type, which degrades the entire rendering pipeline (e.g. losing TrueColor).

WithoutCaps() provides fine-grained control: disable only the problematic capability while keeping everything else at full quality.

Example: JetBrains GoLand and all IntelliJ-based IDEs use JediTerm, which reports as xterm-256color but mishandles CBT (Cursor Backward Tab), causing invalid rendering. A follow-up ultraviolet PR will add auto-detection for known problematic terminals; this PR provides the Bubble Tea-level API that lets developers handle cases not yet auto-detected.

Usage

import uv "github.com/charmbracelet/ultraviolet"

// Disable CBT for terminals that don't support it
p = tea.NewProgram(model, tea.WithoutCaps(uv.CapCBT))

Changes

• options.go — New WithoutCaps(...uv.Capability) program option for manual capability control.
• options_test.go — Tests for WithoutCaps.
• cursed_renderer.go — New setDisabledCaps() method that stores and applies disabled caps. Also applied during reset() so caps survive renderer recreation.
• tea.go — New disabledCaps []uv.Capability field on Program.

Before merging

Once ultraviolet PR #100 is merged then you need to run go get github.com/charmbracelet/ultraviolet@<commit> , followed by go mod tidy.

Test plan

• Manual testing with JediTerm (GoLand terminal) confirms rendering issue is resolved
• All existing tests pass

[aymanbagabas]

Hi @mikeschinkel, I opened JetBrains/jediterm#331 to fix this upstream in JediTerm 🙂

[mikeschinkel]

@aymanbagabas — Very cool, thank you.

Now let’s see if JetBrains will prioritize evaluating it. 🤷‍♂️