SO — Shift Out

Byte	0x0E
Mnemonic	SO
Otty support	✓

Description

Switches the active character set to G1. Combined with ESC ( B / ESC ) 0 etc. to designate which character set G0 / G1 point at.

In practice this is used to enable the DEC special graphics charset (line-drawing characters) without VT100 escape sequences. Modern Unicode-aware programs use the Unicode box-drawing range directly instead — see Box Drawing.

Example

# Designate G1 as DEC Special Graphics, switch to it, draw a corner, switch back.
printf '\e)0\x0el\x0f'
# 0x0e = SO, 0x0f = SI, 'l' in DEC SG is "top-left corner"

Related

• SI — switches back to G0.
• Box Drawing