vater – 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 like Noto 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. If VATER_SELECT_TO_CLIPBOARD is set to 1, 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 font

  On Debian and Ubuntu, it's in the xfonts-efont-unicode and xfonts-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 the efont font family by creating a configuration file /etc/fonts/conf.d/99-enable-fixed-bitmap.conf and run fc-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 to BiWidth

• 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 ;-)