* What is VTE?
-- You could say that VTE is something of a research project of mine, based on
- the simple question: "if programs can use a termcap file (through either
- libtermcap or curses or ncurses) to determine how to drive a terminal, why
- can't a terminal emulator use a termcap file to determine how to behave?"
-* What does VTE include?
-- VTE includes a library (libvte) which implements such a terminal emulator
- widget for GTK+ 2.0, and a sample application (vte) which wraps that widget
- in a GTK window.
+VTE is a library (libvte) implementing a terminal emulator widget for GTK+,
+and a minimal sample application (vte) using that. Vte is mainly used in
+gnome-terminal, but can also be used to embed a console/terminal in games,
+editors, IDEs, etc.
-* How does it work?
-- The VTE library inserts terminal capability strings into a trie, and then
- uses it to determine if data received from a pseudo-terminal is a control
- sequence or just random data. The sample program "interpret" illustrates
- what the widget actually sees after it filters incoming data.
+VTE supports Unicode and character set conversion, as well as emulating any
+terminal known to the system's terminfo database.
-* What's missing?
-- Entries in the termcap file also don't contain the sequences which a terminal
- is supposed to send to the application when a specific sequence is received
- (for example, the query-cursor-position control sequence). I haven't figured
- out how to do those yet.
-- Most commands specific to Xterm or dtterm are recognized, but very few of
- their behaviors are implemented.
-- Portions of the alternate charset support (usually used for line-drawing)
- aren't done yet, but most of it is.
-- Certain termcap-specific commands aren't implemented yet. There are enough
- to run ls, vim, less, and probably emacs and mutt, but more need to be
- implemented.
-- I'm not sure the widget implementation itself is correct. There are many
- changes in going from GTK+ 1.2 to 2.0, and examples of the proper way to do
- things is currently scarce, so some of it's guesswork.
-- An actual property interface needs to be retrofitted over the various options
- which are currently hard-coded at startup-time.
-- The widget uses wide characters internally, converting from the narrow streams
- it interfaces with for internal storage using iconv, but it doesn't handle
- changes to the terminal encoding in the middle of a block of characters until
- after it's processed the entire block, meaning that sometimes encoding isn't
- handled properly.
-- Selection and copy/paste support isn't started yet.
-- Input method support isn't started yet.
-- Mouse tracking isn't started yet.
+VTE doesn't have a homepage. Report any issues at:
+
+ http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=vte
projects / vte.git / blobdiff