FbTerm - a fast FrameBuffer based TERMinal emulator for linux

DESCRIPTION

FbTerm is a fast terminal emulator for linux with frame buffer device or VESA video card. Features include:

• mostly as fast as terminal of linux kernel while accelerated scrolling is enabled
• select font with fontconfig and draw text with freetype2, same as Qt/Gtk+ based GUI apps
• dynamicly create/destroy up to 10 windows initially running default shell
• record scrollback history for every window
• auto-detect current locale and convert text encoding, support double width scripts like Chinese, Japanese etc
• switch between configurable additional text encodings with hot keys on the fly
• copy/past selected text between windows with mouse when gpm server is running
• change the orientation of screen display, a.k.a. screen rotation
• lightweight input method framework with client-server architecture
• background image for eye candy (set FBTERM_BACKGROUND_IMAGE)
• background image fed through shared memory (set FBTERM_BACKGROUND_IMAGE_PATH to the shared memory path (e.g. /fbterm.background for /dev/shm/fbterm.background in linux); the background gets updated by signaling SIGIO; the pid is initially present in the shared memory; (fbterm_background_feeder is such a feeder)

read man page doc/fbterm.1 for usage help.

INPUT METHOD

Instead of adding input method directly in FbTerm, a client-server based input method framework is designed to do this work. FbTerm acts as a client, standalone IM program as a server, and they run in seperated processes.

If you want to develope a new IM program for FbTerm, there is a IM example in im/ directory, which help you to understand IM architecture and provide some base sources to simplify the development.