Multimedia Terminal Emulator: get more out of your command line!
GPL-2.0 License
The aim of this project is to provide an easy to use terminal emulator that supports inlining multimedia widgets using native code as opposed to web technologies like Electron.
Currently the project is very alpha.
The idea behind this terminal emulator is that is can be used by any $SHELL, however hooks will be built into Murex so the terminal will be instantly usable even before wider support across other shells and command line applications is adopted.
At its heart, mxtty
is a regular terminal emulator. Like Kitty, iTerm2, and
PuTTY (to name a few). But where mxtty
differs is that it also supports
inlining rich content. Some terminal emulators support inlining images. Others
might also allow videos. But none bar some edge case Electron terminals offer
collapsible trees for JSON printouts. Easy to navigate directory views. Nor any
other interactive elements that we have come to expect on modern user
interfaces.
The few terminal emulators that do attempt to offer this usually fail to be good, or even just compatible, with all the CLI tools that we've come to depend on.
mxtty
aims to do both well. Even if you never want for any interactive
widgets, mxtty
will be a good terminal emulator. And for those who want a
little more GUI in their CLI, mxtty
will be a great modern user interface.
mxtty
uses SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer)
which is a simple hardware-assisted multimedia library. This enables the
terminal emulator to be both performant and also cross-platform. Essentially
providing some of the conveniences that people have come to love from tools
like Electron while still offering the benefits of native code.
The multimedia and interactive components will be passed from the controlling
terminal applications via ANSI escape sequences. Before groan, yes I agree that
in-band escape sequences are a lousy way of encoding meta-information. However
to succeed at being a good terminal emulator, it needs to support some historic
design decisions no matter how archaic they might seem today. This allows
mxtty
to work with existing terminal applications and for third parties to
easily add support for their applications to render rich content in mxtty
without breaking compatibility for legacy terminal emulators.
In short, a lot!! Some of what has been detailed above is still aspirational. Some of it has already been delivered but in a very alpha state. And while there is lots of error handling and unit tests, test coverage is still pretty low and exceptions will crash the terminal (quite deliberately, because I want to see where the application fails).
Below is a high level TODO list of features and compatibility. If an item is ticked but not working as expected, then please raise an issue in Github.
eg xterm
and similar terminal emulators
tmux
vim
murex
Support for the following platforms is planned:
Currently mxtty can only be compiled from source.
To do so you will need the following installed:
pkg-config
Aside from that, it's as easy as running go build .
from the git repository
root directory.
Regardless of your time and skill set, there are multiple ways you can support this project:
Contributing code: This could be bug fixes, new features, or even just correcting any typos.
Testing: There is a plethora of different software that needs to run
inside a terminal emulator and a multitude of distinct platforms that this
could run on. Any support testing mxtty
would be greatly appreciated.
Documentation: This is possibly the hardest part of any project to get right. Eventually documentation for this will follow the same structure as Murex Rocks (albeit its own website) however, for now, any documentation written in markdown is better than none.
Architecture discussions: I'm always open to discussing code theory. And if it results in building a better terminal emulator, then that is a worthwhile discussion to have.
Porting escape codes to other applications: Currently Murex
is the pioneer for supporting mxtty
-specific ANSI escape codes. However it
would be good to see some of these extensions expanded out further. Maybe
even to a point where this terminal emulator isn't required any more than a
place to beta test future proposed escape sequences.