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That's fascinating! Did you have a specific itch you wanted to scratch by writing your own terminal? Or was it a learning project that you found useful?
by bloopernova 3y ago
That's fascinating! Did you have a specific itch you wanted to scratch by writing your own terminal? Or was it a learning project that you found useful?
- vidarh 3y agoA combination of a procrastination project, wanting a pure Ruby library I can use for output from hybrid applications (e.g. my editor) to be able to have a mostly terminal UI but being able to add in limited graphics when available, and wanting a testbed for other terminal changes I want to experiment with in terms of creating more of a hybrid UI. A basic terminal can be fairly small - mine is ~1800 lines of Ruby at the moment, which I consider disappointingly large. For comparison st is ~8k lines, I think, and xterm is ~88k. But you can do a working terminal in far less than my 1800, even in more verbose languages, so it's a nice space to play in where you can get something that works in very little (set TERM to a dumber terminal than rxvt, dump any escape sequences your terminal doesn't yet understand to a log, and run the apps you need, then iterate...), and build up in whichever direction you want to something quite usable very quickly. Then you can spend a lifetime polishing quirky little details nobody with you will ever care about... ;)