midterm

a pretty mid terminal library

Midterm is a virtual terminal emulator. There is no GUI, but it has conveniences for rendering back to a terminal or to HTML.

Some examples:

• Progrock uses it for displaying progress logs.
• Dagger uses it for interactive shells, also rendered via Progrock.
• Bass uses it for rendering terminal output in its docs. (And also uses Progrock.)

Project goals

• Compatibility with everyday tools like htop and vim.
• Good enough performance, though optimizations haven't been sought out yet so there's probably some low hanging fruit.
• Composability/versatility, e.g. forwarding OSC requests/responses between an outer terminal and a remote shell in a container.
• Anything you'd expect for interactive shells: full mouse support, 256 colors, copy/paste, etc. - though there's no GUI so this really just amounts to forwarding ANSI sequences between local/remote shells.

What's it for?

This is not a GUI terminal emulator intended for everyday use. It's all in-memory. If you want to wrap it in a GUI, feel free!

Right now it's used for rendering terminals embedded in other TUIs (Progrock), and for rendering terminal output in documentation.

What's with the name?

It used to be called vt100, but then I added support for things beyond vt100 like scroll regions, and I don't want to keep renaming it.

I went with midterm because this library often sits in between a local and remote terminal (e.g. dagger shell), so it's a middle terminal. :man_shrugging:

Credit

Based on tonistiigi/vt100 which was was based on jaguilar/vt100.