Slim (124kB linked shared) and fast terminal emulator for X11,
with minimal external dependencies (Xlib, Xft, fontconfig and freetype).
Descendant of st (suckless terminal), modified extensively.
VT102 compatible.
The focus is on stability, performance, good rendering and VTx compatibility,
for tabs or split screen I suggest to use either screen/tmux or
i3(my recommendation)/herbstluft/tabbed.
Finally getting close to a first "stable" release.
Only things missing (imho) are history search and storing.
Should run stable, please open issues for any crashes.
The statically linked binary 'slterm_linux_amd64' in 'releases' should work for every
64bit linux with a running xorg xserver, and (surprisingly) doesn't need more
memory than the shared executable.
Ram usage with an empty history buffer is about (virtual) 6MB + (resident) 4MB.
Packages for the latest release of ubuntu (linked shared) and a statically
linked linked binary package for all 64bit versions of debian/ubuntu/any distribution with .deb
support are also in 'releases'.
- Lessmode: scroll around with less like keybindings
- Shift+Backspace: enter 'lessmode', and scroll back to the line the last command has been entered in the shell * Retmarks: Tab/Backspace to jump in lessmode to the locations of entered commands
- Scrollmarks: Set bookmarks to scroll back and forward
- Hotkeys for changing font size, -spacing and inverting colors
- Inline help (reference of the bound keys)
- Switching codepages with hotkeys (cp437,cp850,cp1252,..)
- Input translation of unicode / X Keysyms to the current codepage
- Several performance and memory usage related modifications; slterm should be the fastest available terminal emulator for X, which does real scrolling
- secure mode, option -X: lock all pages into memory, prevent swapping to disk
- Gradient custom 32 color palette for colors 0..7 (0..7 with attributes normal, bold, faint, bold_faint) and the first 16 background colors
- Copy whole lines in the history with 'yy' in selection mode
- Additional cursor shapes
- utf8 clipboard conversion
-
Alt+Shift+l/Up/Down/PageUp/PageDownto enter "lessmode".Afterwards in "lessmode" Cursor keys and PageUp/Down scroll around.
-
qorEscapeleave lessmode. -
Shift+Returnto execute a command in the shell and automatically enter lessmode, if more than one screen is written by the command. -
Shift+Backspace: Enable lessmode and scroll back to the location, the last command was entered. -
Tab,Tab left: Jump back and forth to the locations, commands had been entered.
set mark: Ctrl+Alt+n (n=0..9)
goto mark: Ctrl+n
(lessmode): 'n' (number without modifier)
retmarks: the positions within the terminal history is saved for
every line, entered with return.
Go back: Shift+Backspace
cycle (in lessmode): tab left/right, backspace
Ctrl+Shift+Insert/DeleteEnlarge/Shrink font widthCtrl+Shift+Home/EndEnlarge/Shrink font heightCtrl+Shift+PageUp/PageDownZoom font in / outCtrl+Shift+BackspaceReset to default font size.Ctrl+Shift+IInverse colors
per default CP1252 ( ANSI, ISO 8859-1, DEC-MCS(nearly) ) is used, and only the first page. (0x20-0xff), "extended ascii", ansi.
CP437 (IBM-PC1, et al., with those signs to draw borders and boxes), cp850, cp1250, cp1251, cp1253 are compiled in, and can be selected by Ctrl+Win+[0..5] A combination of cp437 and cp1252 is named cp4002, and used with Ctrl_Win+6. It has German Umlauts and the box drawing characters of cp437, at the usual codepoints.
Other codepages would be possible, by adding them to charmap.h, and edit config.h
All tables are used with 8bit ascii, for performance reasons.
Keyboard input is translated to the current charmap.
UTF8 is abandoned for now, besides utf8 conversion from/to the X clipboard.
The default 7 colors, with additional 3 attributes bold, faint and bold_faint ( so there are 32 colors ) are configured as color gradients, configurable in config.h
The 256 colors map follows the xterm standard, with the difference of more contrast with faint and bold_faint attributes.
Combining blink and inverse attributes does blinking by reversing. (wonderful)
echo -e '\e[48;5;9;32;1;6;7m\n\n BLINK \n'
Ctrl+F1
Show inline help, and the reference of keybindings
Cursor and configurable cursorcolor for unfocused windows,
cursor gets highlighted on focus in
The sourcecode is heavily modified, partly rewritten, and split into smaller sections. (Originally it had been one single file with several thousand lines).
Applied 'official' patches:
- anysize
- clipboard
- keyboard_select
- relative_border
- scrollback
- scrollback-mouse
- scrollback-mouse-increment
- selectioncolors
- xresources
added commandline switch -x to enable reading the xresources,
compile time switch "XRESOURCES"
Further info is in slterm.1, Patches and LOG.md
(A screenshot of i3 and 3 instances of slterm)
Stripped unicode support in favour of the 256 chars (extended) ASCII table
utf8 is an optional compiletime switch now.(was).
(Most programs suddenly handle German Umlauts, etc.pp out of the box, using the ASCII table / CP1250 only.
E.g. bash, vi, .. What is an interesting result. st has a quite good unicode handling,
but until yet I always needed to dive into the configurations for
entering chars like ä,ö,ß in unicode mode)
Besides, instead of having a history buffer, which needs 15 Bytes per Glyph
(a Glyph is a char on the screen with text attributes and colors)
- now each Glyph is 4 Bytes. What can be nicely optimized.
"256" colors (with attributes faint, normal, bold) and the ascii table without control characters as displayed by slterm.
The scripts for creating the output are within ./test
.. Did split the sourcefile (one big file with several thousand lines) into smaller pieces. Hopefully hacking slterm is in the future a little bit more conveniant.
- make
- gcc
- Xlib
- Xft
- freetype2
- pkgconf (pkgconfig)
- optional, to embed resources: rst2man, xdd (comes with vim)
For ubuntu : 'sudo apt-get install libfreetype-dev x11proto-dev fontconfig libx11-dev libxft-dev python3-docutils vim'
Statically linked 64bit binary: Download from 'releases', save the binary within /usr/local/bin, (chmod a+x slterm), no further requirements besides a running Xserver are needed.
For Ubuntu, latest release:
download the latest release package .deb package from 'releases' at github.
For the shared linked package: install dependencies: ' sudo apt-get install libfreetype6 libxft2 libfontconfig1 fonts-liberation ' install the package: ' sudo dpkg -i slterm_xxx.deb '
Ubuntu/debian/any 64bit linux distribution with .deb package support, downlad the slterm_xxx_static.deb package, and install it with dpkg. No requirements besides the X Server are needed, the package is completely self containing.
From source:
edit config.make (optionally) edit src/config.h (optionally)
make
make install
The default configuration might be save.
(no utf8, scrollback history 65536 lines, no XResources, installs into /usr/local/bin)
If you'd like to change the preferences, please edit config.h and config.make
-
About utf8
-
A comparison on latency, speed and memory consumption of different terminal emulators. st and urxvt standing out.
-
Latency.
-
Latency, comparing old (1980) and nowadays systems.
Switching back and forth from alt screen does reset the cursor position, but doesn't clear the screen for remote ssh sessions.
Retmarks aren't accurate for every 65536 lines.
No UTF8 UTF-8 currently would need some work, stripped for performance reasons.
Xresources, untested for a while. Currently colors are not used.
crashes with the alt screen corrected ret marks and scrollmarks
====================
(misc147 2020-2025 - github.com/michael105)
Based on Aurelien APTEL bt source code.
Fetched from the suckless git repo (suckless.org) on 2020/01/01.
Please see for more information on the authors of the patches PATCHES (Tonton Couillon, dcat, Jochen Sprickerhof, M Farkas-Dyck, Ivan Tham, Ori Bernstein, Matthias Schoth, Laslo Hunhold, Paride Legovini, Lorenzo Bracco, Kamil Kleban, Avi Halachmi, Jacob Prosser, Augusto Born de Oliveira, Kai Hendry, Laslo Hunhold, Matthew Parnell, Doug Whiteley, Aleksandrs Stier, Devin J. Pohly, Sai Praneeth Reddy)
My apologies for not pushing the work back to suckless, but the heavy changes and the not so simple additions let me seem this neither easy nor following the suckless philosophy; and it wouldn't be possible to submit "patches" anymore.