Bobcat - Terminal Emulator

Bobcat is a cross-platform terminal emulator built on the U++ rapid application development framework and TerminalCtrl, a powerful vt widget. It leverages these technologies to provide a versatile and user-friendly command-line interface.

Disclaimer: Bobcat is a work in progress. Although it should be pretty stable by now, use it with caution.

Table of Contents

1. Features
2. Requirements
3. Installation
4. To Do
5. Screenshots
6. Videos
7. Acknowledgements
8. License

Features

For a full range of supported VT features, see the Features section of TerminalCtrl's docs.

For a full range of supported VT sequences, modes and control commands, see the technical specifications document of TerminalCtrl.

• Cross-Platform: Bobcat can basically run on any OS that U++ can be compiled on: Linux, Windows, MacOS, and BSD.

• High Compatibility: Recognizes and supports a wide range of terminal sequences (ESC, CSI, DCS, OSC, APC) sequences, ensuring high VT (DEC/ANSI) and xterm compatibility. (By default Bobcat emulates a DEC VT420 with various extensions)

• Image Support: Supports both legacy (sixel) and modern image formats (png, jpg, bmp, tiff) for inline image display, and recognizes sixel, iterm2 & jexer protocols.

• OSC Extensions: Implements newer OSC extensions, including hyperlinks, clipboard manipulation protocol, etc.

• Annotations: Supports plain and rich text annotations, both programatically and via user input.

• Versatile Copy/Paste: Supports copy/paste/drag-and-drop operations on texts, links, and inline-images.

• Multiple Profiles: Supports multiple terminal and color profiles.

• Configurable UI: Offers a configurable user interface, allowing for a bare-bone terminal or fully-fledged GUI.

• Stacked Interface: Uses a stacked interface to reduce UI clutter, including a terminal manager called Navigator to navigate between open/stacked terminals.

• Simple Configuration: Uses a simple JSON format for configuration files.

• Multiple Pty Support on Windows: Each profile can use ConPty or WinPty (via a runtime switch) on Windows. WinPty backend is statically linked and does not require msys2 or cygwin environments but can be also used with them.

• Mouse Events: Supports mouse events for almost all protocols.

• Configurable Keys: Supports configurable keyboard shortcuts for a personalized experience.

• Emoji Support: Can display color emojis (depending on the font).

• Colorful Experience: Supports 16, 256, and 24-Bit colors, xterm's dynamic colors feature, and even recognizes CMY and CMYK color spec formats.

• Powerful search engine: Bobcat has a powerful search & highlight engine called Finder. It can do case sensitive/insensitive and regexp based searchs in both visible page and scrollaback buffer. It can navigate the found strings in both directions. Furthermore, it has a harvester that lets the user harvest the found text in regexp search mode and export them as a csv files. So, for example if you need to search for url patterns in the terminal's buffer, you can simply pass your url regexp pattern to Finder and let it "reap" and export the matched patterns to a file. Wait, there is more! While doing this, Finder can keep the horizontal order intact; namely it can "map" the found strings as/is. This can come in handy, say, if you need to reap a table, or an output that has a certain line pattern.

• Linkify anything: Bobcat has a module called Linkifier that let's you convert any text into clickable hyperlinks, using a regexp pattern match. Each terminal profile can have its own linkifier configuration and each can scan for more than one pattern.

• Smart text selection: Bobcat let's user configure their own text (word) selection pattern(s). Once again, the setting is per-profile and multiple patterns can be defined at once.

• Performance: Reasonably fast and less memory-hungry.

• Web support: Bobcat can run on any web browser that has HTML5 and canvas support, remotely. Deploy it on your server, access it anywhere! (!!! EXPERIMENTAL !!!)

• Headless UI support Bobcat can be compiled to run on SDL2-GL backend, without requiring a fully-fledged desktop environment. (!!! EXPERIMENTAL !!!)

• Can run doom!

Requirements

Requirements are not heavy. Below are the tools you need to compile Bobcat.

• CLANG/GCC with at least C++17.
• U++ framework.
• TerminalCtrl
• StackCtrl

Installation

There are three ways to install the source code of Bobcat:

1. The package is immediately available via UppHub, the 3rd-party source package management system of U++. This is the simplest and recommended method. But in order to use UppHub you will need TheIDE, the integrated development environment for U++. TheIDE is available in binary or in source form. On windows it comes bundled with the U++ installer. On Linux it can be easily downloaded via flathub, or built manually, as it is a part of the upp's source code.

2. On linux, the provided makefile can also be used to compile Bobcat. This makefile downloads umk (U++ make) in binary form to speed up the compilation process. Steps to download, build and run the Bobcat via this method are:

   1. make download
   2. make build or make build-web or 'make build-headless'
   3. make run

3. Or you can manually clone or download this repository and set it up as an U++ assembly or nest. You can find more information on U++ packages, assemblies and nests, here.

To Do

• Macro infrastructure, based on Upp::Esc scripting language.
• A "lite" plugin framework.

Screenshots

Below you can find a handful of screenshots of Bobcat, running on Linux & Windows.

Bobcat on Linux

Bobcat on Windows

Bobcat, running zellij, with a background image of well..., a bobcat!

Multiple terminal profile support (linux, btop)

Inline images support (linux, jexer)

Navigator (linux)

Finder, in regex-based search mode (linux)

Harvester, harvesting 124660 URLs from the buffer, and mapping them into a csv file (linux)

Settings windows (linux)

Far manager running on Bobcat (Windows 10)

Bobcat deployed as a simple web server with access from web browsers (Linux)

Bobcat deployed as a simple web server with access from web browsers (Windows)

Bobcat running "headless" on SDL2 (GL) backend (Linux)

Doom, running on Bobcat, via mochadoom (Linux)

Videos

A very short demonstration of Bobcat, running DOOM!

A very short demonstration of finder/harvester and unicode character (emoji) input.

Acknowledgements

To be written...

License

Copyright (c) 2023-2024, İsmail Yılmaz

Bobcat is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Bobcat is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Bobcat. If not, see gnu licenses