Can I push/pop attributes with tput?

Question

In the answer to this question , it uses the following (simplified):

echo "this is $(tput bold)bold$(tput sgr0) but this isn't"

But that tput sgr0 resets all of the text attributes.

I'd like to output coloured text, with only some of it in bold. So I want something like this:

echo "$(tput setaf 1)this is red; $(tput bold)this is bold; $(tput unbold)this is red, but not bold"

But tput unbold isn't a thing.

Is there any way to push/pop the terminal attributes so that I could do something like the following?

echo "$(tput setaf 1)this is red; $(tput push; tput bold)this is bold; $(tput pop)this is red, but not bold"

Answer 1

No - tput has no notion of push/pop. Just set : like a pun, tput is a more general tool than tset , as noted in themanual page :

• SVr3 replaced that, a year later, by a more extensive program whose init and reset subcommands (more than half the program) were incorporated from the reset feature of BSDtset written by Eric Allman.

tput does nothing like push/pop, because it would have to rely upon asking the terminal what the current video attributes are (something that only a minority of the terminals could do).

Some terminals could/can do this, eg, the DEC VT420's DECRQSS control mentioned in XTerm Control Sequences . Most do not (even limiting this to xterm-imitators).

tput works with terminal capabilities; none of the predefined ones in terminfo(5) deal with stacks.

That's not to say that someone might develop an application like tput which could work with a terminal that supports stacking, either by supporting push/pop or set/get controls. (xterm does both).