[Extension Request] flet-xterm — Terminal emulator control wrapping xterm.dart

[Nwokike]

Use Case

I'm building a mobile cloud compute client that executes Python code on remote runtimes. The app needs a proper terminal component to display output from:

• Package installations (pip install, apt-get) with progress bars
• Interactive CLI tools with ANSI escape codes
• Error tracebacks with color formatting
• Long-running ML training scripts with tqdm progress

Currently I'm using ft.Text + TextSpan with rich.AnsiDecoder for basic ANSI parsing, but this approach cannot handle cursor movement, in-place line overwrites, screen clearing, or 256-color palettes. Progress bars from pip render as hundreds of separate lines instead of updating in-place.

Proposed Solution

Wrap xterm.dart (647★, v4.0.0) as a Flet extension package flet-xterm.
xterm.dart is a mature, 60fps Flutter terminal emulator supporting full VT100/xterm emulation, used by RustDesk and kubenav. It works on all platforms Flet targets (Android, iOS, Web, Desktop).

Python API sketch:

import flet as ft
from flet_xterm import XTerm

def main(page: ft.Page):
    terminal = XTerm(
        expand=True,
        theme="dark",
        font_family="RobotoMono",
        font_size=14,
        on_output=lambda e: print(f"User typed: {e.data}"),
    )
    page.add(terminal)
    
    terminal.write("$ pip install torch\r\n")
    page.update()

ft.app(main)

Why This Should Be Official

• Terminal emulation is a fundamental building block for developer tools, SSH clients, and remote compute apps.
• There is NO existing terminal component in the Flet ecosystem (official or community).
• Multiple community members have requested this in past discussions.
• The extension template + xterm.dart make this a clean implementation following the same pattern as flet-video and flet-webview.

References

• xterm.dart: https://pub.dev/packages/xterm
• xterm.dart GitHub: https://github.com/TerminalStudio/xterm.dart
• Flet extension docs: https://flet.dev/docs/extend/creating-an-extension
• Also see: kterm (https://pub.dev/packages/kterm) — newer alternative with Kitty protocol support.