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I want a way to embed a terminal (it doesn't have to support a myriad terminal emulations, only one) inside a graphical program. MacOS first, but other platform

I want a way to embed a terminal (it doesn't have to support a myriad terminal emulations, only one) inside a graphical program. MacOS first, but other platforms would be nice. So, imagine a normal GUI window, but one of the components in it is a terminal window. Is there something like that? Or should I just use mono font text view?

ho_schi 2y ago
GNOMEs Gtk has a companion library named libvte which provides the terminal as widget. It is used by Gnome-Terminal (and many other terminals) itself and now supports Gtk4: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte Basically its usage starts with vte_terminal_new(). Unicode? Emojis? https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/blob/master/doc/ambiguous.txt?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/blob/master/doc/ambiguo... What hurts me? The only thing which hurts me is that the maintainer doesn’t like background transparency in the official terminal application. The library supports it and many terminals use it. But this is another topic. With an embedded terminal you will likely not use that feature ;) PS: KDE likely has a smiliar solution within Qt. As you named portability either Gtk or Qt are you tools. The biggest hurdle is shipping the libraries on macOS. On Linux it is done automatically. Windows is rather easy. Regarding Gtk, ship the gdk-pixbuf loaders alongside, they are loaded at runtime via dlopen(). The small differences hurt during porting.
aatd86 2y ago
People probably simply emulate a terminal window and execute the commands via the OS APIs (syscalls). This is unlikely to be truly "embedding".
joerick 2y ago
I've used xterm.js for this, but I was already in a webview. It's pretty good, might even be worth the webview for https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js Used by vscode among others

ho_schi 2y ago

GNOMEs Gtk has a companion library named libvte which provides the terminal as widget. It is used by Gnome-Terminal (and many other terminals) itself and now supports Gtk4: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte Basically its usage starts with vte_terminal_new(). Unicode? Emojis? https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/blob/master/doc/ambiguous.txt?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/blob/master/doc/ambiguo... What hurts me? The only thing which hurts me is that the maintainer doesn’t like background transparency in the official terminal application. The library supports it and many terminals use it. But this is another topic. With an embedded terminal you will likely not use that feature ;) PS: KDE likely has a smiliar solution within Qt. As you named portability either Gtk or Qt are you tools. The biggest hurdle is shipping the libraries on macOS. On Linux it is done automatically. Windows is rather easy. Regarding Gtk, ship the gdk-pixbuf loaders alongside, they are loaded at runtime via dlopen(). The small differences hurt during porting.

aatd86 2y ago

People probably simply emulate a terminal window and execute the commands via the OS APIs (syscalls). This is unlikely to be truly "embedding".

joerick 2y ago

I've used xterm.js for this, but I was already in a webview. It's pretty good, might even be worth the webview for https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js Used by vscode among others