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* 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. Because I'm more concerned with whether or not it works,
all settings are hard-coded to whatever I needed to test the last time I
touched it. If you actually want to use the widget to get work done, you
should probably be using profterm.
* 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.
* What's missing?
- Accessibility isn't started yet.
- Mouse tracking isn't started yet.
- 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). This mostly looks
like XTerm's DCS command, but there may be others.
- Most commands specific to Xterm or dtterm are recognized, but very few of
their behaviors are implemented. Luckily, many of them are duplicates of
standard termcap behaviors, and because we parse termcap first, they work
correctly for "xterm".
- 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.
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