teseq

About teseq

From Debian's package description

GNU Teseq is a tool for analyzing files that contain control characters and terminal control sequences, by printing these control sequences and their meanings in readable English. It is intended to be useful for debugging terminal emulators, and programs that make heavy use of advanced terminal features such as cursor movement, coloring, and other effects.

Teseq is useful for:

• Creating animated, interactive demos to run on the terminal (see https://asciinema.org/a/7445 for a video on how to do this).
• Knowing the exact output of a program (did it have spaces at the end of the line? Or maybe it contains invisible control characters?).
• Examining a text file's contents unambiguously, like cat -v or the ed program's l command (but with much more information).
• Stripping control sequences from a text file, e.g. to produce a plain ascii text file from a typescript file generated by the script command.
• Examining the invisible control sequences within a text file, that affect graphical formatting or character encoding, in order to understand how they work and where they appear in the file.
• Debugging graphical terminal applications, and terminal emulators.

From Debian's description of the teseq package, under that package's license.