nterm

About

Nterm is a vt100 terminal emulator for emacs. Eventually I would like it to replace xterm for my daily use.

Nterm is written in Emacs Lisp a great language worth learning.

Screen shots

I run aptitude the line drawing is correct.

This is vttest showing off double width characters.

Download

Should you want to try it, download it now.

Changelog

Version 0.5

• Much faster
• All drawing characters are bitmaps (hard coded 12x24 for now)

Version 0.4

• add unit testing
• don't reset attributes with EL
• rewrite of ED EL and nterm-vt100-blank-line
• remove nterm-debug-assert it's not useful

Version 0.3

- fix several critical bugs - optimisation makes nterm noticably faster.

Version 0.2

• double width and height font.

Version 0.1

• G0 G1 switching with shift in and shift out
• special graphics characters (used for line drawing)
• US and UK character set.
• blinking, bright, underline and reverse rendition
• scroll up and down including within top and bottom margin
• switch terminal background color
• switch between 80 and 132 columns screen
• tabulation set and reset
• all VT100 escape sequences are handled

TODO list

Things that remains to be done:

• fix line drawing single width characters
• bind C-c C-c to interrupt
• fix slow scrolling
• fix buffer popping when changing cursor position
• US and UK character set.
• ANSI color
• VT52 compatibility mode
• Copy and paste mechanism
• xterm emulator
• Directory tracking
• Handle multiple instance
• Look for TBD in this file for other things...

FAQ

Can I use Unicode?

A: Nope, it's vt100 character set, 8 bit character are just ignored for now

Why write a new emulator when we already have term?

I think nterm is easier to maintain than term. One look at term's term-emulate-terminal function should convince anyone that term cannot be maintained anymore. Compare with nterm equivalent function nterm-emulate it is only 25 lines long.

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