A "suckless-inspired" GPU accelerated terminal emulator.
trap2 is a terminal emulator that uses the GPU to render the terminal.
It's built with OpenGL 3.3 Core Profile, GLFW 3, and libvterm, with a focus on simplicity and performance.
This is very much a work in progress, and I have a lot of ideas for the future:
- Integrate clipboard support
- Better testing harnesses
The development of this terminal emulator ties closely to my CS367 Systems Engineering class at George Mason University. One of the projects required me to implement a shell from scratch, so I decided to try and also build a basic terminal emulator. I've always been interested in terminal emulators, and I've always wanted to build one myself.
This is a learning project for me, so it will always be an amalgamation of new concepts and optimizations that I learn. You can refer to these in the doc folder, where I have most of the technical details and design decisions.
This leads into the 3 limitations that I'm defining for this project (subject to change):
- No support for scrollback since I use tmux as my multiplexer
- No support for mouse input since I don't use the mouse in the terminal
- It'll really only be tested properly on macOS for now, this may change
- The program uses
libvtermto handle the terminal state machine - A multi-threaded GLFW setup is used to handle the input and rendering
- The main thread handles windowing and making rendering calls
- The
ptythread handles reading the child fork output - Minimal synchronization is needed or used to keep things fast
- Rendering is done using
freetype2and complex math to position glyphs
The project uses CMake as its build system. Install cmake and then run the following steps:
- Define a configuration file, see doc/config.md for more details.
mkdir build && cd buildcmake ..cd .. && cmake --build build --parallel
This should produce a binary in your build folder which you can run with ./build/trap2.
Copyright (c) 2023, Aarnav Tale