Terminal Wizardry

This is a rust crate that provides a number of support functions for applications interesting in either displaying data to a terminal or in building a terminal emulator.

It is currently in active development and subject to fairly wild sweeping changes.

Included functionality:

• Surface models a terminal display and its component Cells
• Terminal attributes are aware of modern features such as True Color, Hyperlinks and will also support sixel and iterm style terminal graphics display.
• Surfaces include a log of Changes and an API for consuming and applying deltas. This is a powerful building block for synchronizing screen instances.
• Escape sequence parser decodes inscrutable escape sequences and gives them semantic meaning, making the code that uses them clearer. The decoded escapes can be re-encoded, allowing applications to start with the semantic meaning and emit the appropriate escape sequence without embedding obscure binary bytes.
• Capabilities allows probing for terminal capabilities that may not be included in the system terminfo database, and overriding them in an embedding application.
• Terminal trait provides an abstraction over unix style ttys and Windows style console APIs. Changes from Surface can be rendered to Terminals. Terminals allow decoding mouse and keyboard inputs in both blocking or non-blocking mode.
• Widget trait allows composition of UI elements at a higher level.

Documentation

Until this goes up on crates.io, run:

$ cargo doc --open

to build and browse the docs locally.

TODO

• Load key mapping information from terminfo
• Look at unicode width and graphemes for cells
• ensure that sgr is reset to default on drop
• Option to use alt screen when going raw
• Mouse reporting mode (and restore on drop)
• Bracketed paste mode (and restore on drop)

Windows

Testing via Wine:

sudo apt install gcc-mingw-w64-x86-64
rustup target add x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
cargo build --target=x86_64-pc-windows-gnu  --example hello

Then, from an X session of some kind:

wineconsole cmd.exe

and from there you can launch the generated .exe files; they are found under target/x86_64-pc-windows-gnu/debug