wezterm/README.md

Wez's Terminal

A terminal emulator implemented in Rust.

Quickstart

• Install rustup to get the nightly rust compiler installed on your system. https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html
• Build in release mode: cargo build --release
• Run it via either cargo run --release or target/release/wezterm

You will need a collection of support libraries; important to note is that your harfbuzz library must have support for hb_ft_font_create_referenced; older linux distributions don't have this!

$ sudo apt-get install -y libxcb-icccm4-dev libxcb-ewmh-dev \
    libxcb-image0-dev libxcb-keysyms1-dev libharfbuzz-dev \
    libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev

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

These are in the done/doing soon category:

• Runs on Linux with XCB
• Scrollback (use mouse wheel and Shift Page{Up|Down})
• True Color support
• Color Emoji and font fallback
• Paste selection via Shift-Insert
• xterm style selection of text with mouse
• Configuration file to specify fonts and colors
• Render underline, italic, bold, strikethrough
• Command line argument parsing instead of launching user shell

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. Similarly for key mappings.

Things that I'd like to see happen and that have no immediate priority (contributions to get closer to these are welcomed!)

• Runs on macOS
• Tabs
• Textual renderer. Think tmux or screen.
• Runs 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" }

The default configuration will attempt to use whichever font is returned from fontconfig when monospace is requested.