5.6 KiB
Wez's Terminal
A terminal emulator implemented in Rust, using OpenGL ES 2 for rendering.
Screenshot of wezterm on X11, running vim
Quickstart
- Install
rustup
to get the nightlyrust
compiler installed on your system. https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html - Build in release mode:
rustup run nightly cargo build --release
- Run it via either
rustup run nightly cargo run --release
ortarget/release/wezterm
You will need a collection of support libraries; the get-deps
script will
attempt to install them for you. If it doesn't know about your system,
please contribute instructions!
$ curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh -s -- --default-toolchain nightly
$ git clone --depth=1 --branch=master https://github.com/wez/wezterm.git
$ cd wezterm
$ sudo ./get-deps
$ rustup run nightly cargo build --release
$ rustup run nightly cargo run --release
What?
Here's what I'm shooting for:
- A terminal escape sequence parser
- A model of a terminal screen + scrollback that is OS independent
- Textual and GUI rendering of the model
- A differential protocol for the model
This would manifest as a common core that could run as both a textual terminal multiplexer and a gui terminal emulator, where the GUI part could automatically provide a native UI around the remotely multiplexed terminal session.
Status / Features - Alpha Quality
There may be bugs that cause the terminal to panic. I'd recommend using
tmux
or screen
to keep your session alive if you are working on something important!
Despite the warning above, I've been using wezterm
as my daily driver since
the middle of Feb 2018. The following features are done:
- Runs on Linux under X (requires OpenGL ES 2)
- Scrollback (use mouse wheel and Shift Page{Up|Down})
- True Color support
- Ligatures, Color Emoji and font fallback
- xterm style selection of text with mouse; paste selection via Shift-Insert (bracketed paste is supported!)
- SGR style mouse reporting (works in vim and tmux)
- Render underline, double-underline, italic, bold, strikethrough
- Configuration file to specify fonts and colors
- Hyperlinks per: https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda
There's a good number of terminal escape sequences that are not yet implemented and that will get fleshed out as the applications I use uncover them, or as folks report them here and raise the priority. Similarly for key mappings. Please don't be shy about contributing support for missing things!
Things that I'd like to see happen and that have no immediate priority; contributions to get closer to these are welcomed!
- Run on macOS
- Sixel / iTerm2 graphics protocol support
- Tabs
- Textual renderer. Think
tmux
orscreen
. - Run on Linux with Wayland (use XWayland for now; See https://github.com/tomaka/winit/issues/306 for upstream blockers)
- Run on Windows
Configuration
wezterm
will look for a TOML configuration file in $HOME/.config/wezterm/wezterm.toml
,
and then in $HOME/.wezterm.toml
.
Configuration is currently very simple and the format is considered unstable and subject
to change. The code for configuration can be found in src/config.rs
.
I use the following in my ~/.wezterm.toml
:
font_size = 10
font = { fontconfig_pattern = "Operator Mono SSm Lig Medium" }
# How many lines of scrollback to retain
scrollback_lines = 3500
[[font_rules]]
italic = true
font = { fontconfig_pattern = "Operator Mono SSm Lig Medium:style=Italic" }
[[font_rules]]
italic = true
intensity = "Bold"
font = { fontconfig_pattern = "Operator Mono SSm Lig:style=Italic:weight=bold" }
[[font_rules]]
intensity = "Bold"
[font_rules.font]
fontconfig_pattern= "Operator Mono SSm:weight=bold"
# if you liked xterm's `boldColor` setting, this is how you do it in wezterm,
# but you can apply it to any set of matching attributes!
foreground = "tomato"
[[font_rules]]
intensity = "Half"
font = { fontconfig_pattern = "Operator Mono SSm Lig Light" }
The default configuration will attempt to use whichever font is returned from
fontconfig when monospace
is requested.
Colors
You can configure colors with a section like this. In addition to specifying
SVG/CSS3 color names, you can use #RRGGBB
to specify a color code using the
usual hex notation; eg: #000000
is equivalent to black
:
[colors]
foreground = "silver"
background = "black"
cursor_bg = "springgreen"
ansi = ["black", "maroon", "green", "olive", "navy", "purple", "teal", "silver"]
brights = ["grey", "red", "lime", "yellow", "blue", "fuchsia", "aqua", "white"]
Performance
While ultimate speed is not the main goal, performance is important! Using the GPU to render the terminal contents helps keep CPU usage down and the output feeling snappy.
Here's a very basic benchmark:
$ find /usr > /tmp/usr-files.txt
$ wc -l /tmp/usr-files.txt
364885 /tmp/usr-files.txt
$ time cat /tmp/usr-files.txt
And a comparison between some terminal emulators on my system; they were each
set to 80x24 with 3500 lines of scrollback. alacritty
has no scrollback.
Terminal | Time (seconds) |
---|---|
xterm | 9.863 |
Gnome Terminal | 2.391 |
Terminator 1.91 | 2.319 |
wezterm | 0.940 |
kitty | 0.899 |
urxvt | 0.615 |
alacritty | 0.421 |