Comment by Hendrikto

4 years ago

From the refterm README:

refterm is designed to support several features, just to ensure that no shortcuts have been taken in the design of the renderer. As such, refterm supports:

* Multicolor fonts

* All of Unicode, including combining characters and right-to-left text like Arabic Glyphs that can take up several cells

* Line wrapping

* Reflowing line wrapping on terminal resize

* Large scrollback buffer

* VT codes for setting colors and cursor positions, as well as strikethrough, underline, blink, reverse video, etc.

2 comments

Hendrikto

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zacmps  4 years ago

The really hard part of writing a terminal emulator, at least from my experience working on Alacritty, is fast scrolling with fixed regions (think vim).

Plently of other parts of terminal emulators are tricky to implement performantly, ligatures are one Alacritty hasn't got yet.

  • Hendrikto  4 years ago

    Thanks for the insight.

    I have never written a terminal enulator, so could you maybe summarize why fast scrolling with fixed regions is so hard to implement?