vater โ Vala terminal emulator
vater
is a small terminal emulator written in Vala. It is mostly
using on the VTE library which provides the terminal emulator and
just configures it in the way I want.
This is based on an idea from Write your own terminal emulator - in fact I converted the C code from there to Vala as a starting point.
installation
-
just run
make
it will compile
vater
and try to install it into~/bin
, so you should a) have that directory and b) have it in your$PATH
configuration
At startup, vater
looks for these environment variables:
-
VATER_FONT
controls the font to use. It is passed to Fontconfig, so a valid value should look something likeNoto Mono 11
(which currently is the default font). -
VATER_SELECT_TO_CLIPBOARD
controls selection mode. By default, selected text is only copied to the X11 primary selection. IfVATER_SELECT_TO_CLIPBOARD
is set to1
, selected text is additionally copied to the X11 clipboard.
bitmap font selection
vater
was originally designed to use the efont
bitmap fonts. This
gets harder and harder as classical bitmap fonts managed by the X
server are not en vogue any more. My last success using efont
worked like this:
-
install the
efont
fontOn Debian and Ubuntu, it's in the
xfonts-efont-unicode
andxfonts-efont-unicode-ib
packages. Otherwise see efont. -
for bitmap fonts to work, you might have to tweak your Fontconfig settings
Bitmap fonts are mostly deactivated by default (eg. Ubuntu has
/etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
). Activating all the bitmap fonts could lead to problems, so just activate theefont
font family by creating a configuration file/etc/fonts/conf.d/99-enable-fixed-bitmap.conf
and runfc-cache
afterwards or restart your X session (based on this idea).
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<!-- Enable (efont) fixed bitmap fonts -->
<selectfont>
<acceptfont>
<pattern>
<patelt name="family">
<string>BiWidth</string>
</patelt>
</pattern>
</acceptfont>
</selectfont>
</fontconfig>
-
set
VATER_FONT
toBiWidth
-
no, I don't know why Fontconfig insists on calling
efont
BiWidth
But I'm happy that it worked! Took long enough...
bugs/todos
-
clipboard paste problem
Over SSH, I was only able to paste the first line of several lines in the clipboard (this needs some further investigation). Could be related to my colored prompt and all the escape sequences in there. I think there is code (= further escape sequences) in my prompt that makes xterm only select the plain text but not the color codes. Perhaps this is missing from VTE. Hopefully there are hooks available.
-
use Github issues
This is a Github project, so why keep a list of issues in the README? Just add them as Github issues ;-)