Jvterm

By Jochen Voss, last updated 2011-09-20

Introduction

Jvterm is a terminal emulator, somewhat similar to the Linux text console or the XTerm terminal emulator. Usually it runs in fullscreen mode, so you can use it to make your X11 desktop look like a boring text console ;-)

Some distinctive features of jvterm are the following:

Use of anti-aliased fonts via the freetype library.
Eight different virtual terminals. Similar to the Linux console you can switch between different virtual terminals.
Scrollback buffer. Each of the virtual terminals has a scrollback buffer, accessible via the keyboard (using S-PgUp and S-PgDown). The scrollback buffer is preserved while you switch between the virtual terminals.
Unicode support. You can choose a Unicode locale via the -c option to get a terminal with full Unicode support.
Good terminfo/termcap support. The jvterm terminal emulator supports many text attributes like colors, bright and dim text, reverse display, and blinking text. These are readily accessible to programs via the curses or terminfo libraries.
Selection support. Text from the display including the scrollback area can be selected via the keyboard and fed back into the input stream. This functionality is similar to what the gpm mouse server does.
Built-in image viewer. The terminal emulator is accompanied by the jvterm-imview program, which can display a variety of image formats in the terminal. This is similar to the fbi image viewer on the Linux console.

Jvterm was implemented by Jochen Voss.

Implementation

The program uses the FreeType2 library for font rendering and the SDL and SDL_gfx libraries to output the graphics. Because the code uses special features of the GNU C library and the GNU C compiler, it will probably only compile on GNU/Linux systems.

Screenshots

You can click on the following pictures to get an enlarged view.

	This picture shows a part of the tack terminal test program. You can see some graphics characters from the curses ACS character set, and some text attributes. Of course the text labeled blink blinks in reality.
	This picture shows a color test image from the tack terminal test program.
	This picture shows the jvterm selection support. The selection is controlled with the keyboard. You can also select large amounts of lines, ranging back into the scrollback area.

Download

You can download the jvterm sources here:

jvterm version 0.2.6, 2005-11-10

archive: jvterm-0.2.6.tar.gz (178KB)
signature: jvterm-0.2.6.tar.gz.sig
sha1: 53a6efec9d801ddf11216230088b956e481854b0
md5: eb85d02177de9dcbe697bd9e12022b24

jvterm version 0.2.5, 2005-11-09

archive: jvterm-0.2.5.tar.gz (178KB)
signature: jvterm-0.2.5.tar.gz.sig
sha1: 4ea40fb3d3c5f87db8753d78b7839b106a057060
md5: 87966114149dd07797c573076e349b1e

Please mail any suggestions and bug reports to Jochen Voss <voss@seehuhn.de>. Your message should include the jvterm version number, as obtained by the command jvterm -V.