par-term

A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator frontend built with Rust, powered by par-term-emu-core-rust. Designed for high performance, modern typography, and rich graphics support.

What's New in 0.2.0

🔋 Intelligent Redraw Loop (Power Efficiency)

Significantly reduced CPU and GPU usage by switching from continuous polling to event-driven rendering.

• Smart Redraws: Redraws are only requested when terminal content changes or when animations (scrolling, cursor blink, shaders) are active.
• Improved Battery Life: Implemented ControlFlow::Wait logic, allowing the application to sleep during inactivity instead of maxing out VSync.

🛡️ Robustness & Stability

• Fixed Dropped Input: Resolved a critical issue where keystrokes and paste operations could be silently discarded during heavy rendering.
• parking_lot Mutex Migration: Migrated to parking_lot to eliminate Mutex poisoning risks.
• Graceful Audio Fallback: Prevents crashes if audio output devices are missing; the terminal bell now fails gracefully.

Features

Core Terminal Frontend

• Cross-platform Support: Native performance on macOS (Metal), Linux (Vulkan/X11/Wayland), and Windows (DirectX 12).
• GPU-Accelerated Rendering: Powered by wgpu with custom glyph atlas for blazing-fast text rasterization.
• Inline Graphics: Full support for Sixel, iTerm2, and Kitty graphics protocols.
• Real PTY Integration: Full pseudo-terminal support for interactive shell sessions.
• Advanced Sequence Support: VT100/VT220/VT320/VT420/VT520 compatibility via par-term-emu-core-rust.
• Intelligent Reflow: Full content reflow on window resize, preserving scrollback and visible state.

Modern UI & Visuals

• Custom WGSL Shaders: High-performance scrollbar and post-processing effects.
• Background Images: Support for PNG/JPEG backgrounds with configurable opacity and scaling modes.
• Transparency: True per-pixel alpha transparency (macOS CAMetalLayer optimization).
• Visual Bell: Flash-based alerts for terminal bell events.
• Dynamic Themes: Support for iTerm2-style color schemes (Dracula, Monokai, Solarized, etc.).

Typography & Fonts

• Styled Font Variants: Explicit support for separate Bold, Italic, and Bold-Italic font families.
• Unicode Range Mapping: Assign specific fonts to Unicode ranges (perfect for CJK, Emoji, or Symbols).
• Text Shaping: HarfBuzz-powered shaping for ligatures, complex scripts, and emoji sequences.
• Smart Fallback: Automatic system font discovery and fallback chain.

Selection & Clipboard

• Advanced Selection: Block/Rectangular, Line-based, and Word-based selection modes.
• Multi-platform Clipboard: Seamless integration with system clipboards via arboard.
• Middle-click Paste: Standard Unix-style middle-click paste support.
• Automatic Copy: Optional "copy on select" behavior.

Hyperlinks & URL Detection

• OSC 8 Support: Native support for application-provided hyperlinks.
• Regex Detection: Automatic detection of URLs in terminal output.
• Interactive Links: Ctrl+Click to open links in your default browser, with hover highlighting and tooltips.

Documentation

• Quick Start Guide - Get up and running with custom fonts.
• Compositor Details - Deep dive into the rendering architecture.
• Examples - Comprehensive configuration examples.
• Core Library - Documentation for the underlying terminal engine.

Installation

From Source

Requires Rust 1.85+ (2024 edition) and modern graphics drivers:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/paulrobello/par-term
cd par-term

# Build and run (debug)
cargo run

# Build optimized release version
cargo build --release
./target/release/par-term

macOS Bundle

To create a native macOS .app bundle with a dock icon:

make bundle
make run-bundle

Linux Dependencies

On Linux (Ubuntu/Debian), you may need:

sudo apt install libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev

Keyboard Shortcuts

Configuration

Configuration is stored in YAML format:

• Unix: ~/.config/par-term/config.yaml
• Windows: %APPDATA%\par-term\config.yaml

cols: 80
rows: 24
font_size: 13.0
font_family: "JetBrains Mono"
theme: "dark-background"
window_opacity: 0.95
scrollbar_position: "right"

See examples/config-complete.yaml for a full list of options.

Technology

• Terminal Engine: par-term-emu-core-rust
• Graphics: wgpu (WebGPU for Rust)
• Text: swash + rustybuzz (custom glyph atlas)
• UI: egui for settings and overlays
• Windowing: winit
• Async: tokio

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please ensure you run make checkall before submitting any pull requests.

make fmt       # Format code
make lint      # Run clippy
make test      # Run test suite
make checkall  # Run all of the above

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Author

Paul Robello - probello@gmail.com

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/paulrobello/par-term
• Core Library: https://github.com/paulrobello/par-term-emu-core-rust