Create a cross platform pty crate

[prabirshrestha]

Would it be possible to publish the pty module as a crate that can be reused by other programs.

I haven’t seen any cross platform pty crate that works on Linux, Windows and Mac.

[chrisduerr]

I'm not aware of any concrete issue with why we wouldn't be able to do this, though the use case outside of Alacritty might be limited.

PRs would be very welcome in this regard, if anyone is in need for a PTY crate and was able to make Alacritty's abstractions work. This would also show that it's in demand and that Alacritty's PTY API is useful to other projects.

[zacps]

See: https://github.com/Microsoft/node-pty

[zacps]

I happen to have found a use for this in one of my projects. As it stands, the api isn't too dependant on the rest of alacritty, it's mostly just configuration that would need to be pulled out of the tty module.

That said the current API is mio based, while what I (and probably most others) want is something tokio based.

I might look at making this happen after the current async ecosystem stabilizes a bit.

[prabirshrestha]

WezTerm now has pty exported as crate.

https://crates.io/crates/portable-pty

https://docs.rs/portable-pty/0.2.0/portable_pty/

[nixpulvis]

@zacps I took am planning on using Tokio myself for another project, I'll be curious how things go for you. IIRC @chrisduerr started some work in Alacritty using tokio as well in #1512, though I'm unsure how it would all play together with the other event code we have.