This is tt, a very lightweight terminal emulator implemented using Ruby 1.9 with no dependencies beyond the standard libraries with Tk enabled.

tt provides a very limited feature set, akin to the 9term terminal. In fact, it does just about nothing:

% infocmp 9term 
#       Reconstructed via infocmp from file: /usr/share/terminfo/9/9term
9term|Plan9 terminal emulator for X,
        am,
        bel=^G, cud1=^J,

This means you will not be able to run vi or other curses software. Also, there is no support for ANSI color sequences. Note that “tt” is only two thirds of a real “tty”.

However, tt also has some benefits over classic vt100-compatible terminal emulators:

• You can fully edit the buffer, fix commands there and resend them (with middle-button-swipe) or add comments.

• By default, scroll mode is enabled so it feels like an ordinary terminal. If you disable scroll mode, commands displaying more output than fits on the screen will be scrolled no further; use PageUp/PageDown keys to scroll yourself.

• You can easily search in the buffer. Select text, right-click and select Fwd or Bwd. The context menu will remember your last action, so searching again works like a breeze.

• The last two features more or less replace more(1) or less(1).

• There is a hold-buffer which you can pull out from the bottom border: Edit text here as you wish and send it with one press of Shift-Return to the terminal at once. This makes ed(1) or mail(1) way more fun to use.

• There is a command bar which you can pull out from the top border (or prefill with the -border argument): Insert comands there and either middle-click on single words or middle-button-swipe a selection to run them in the terminal. This is nice for frequent users of make(1) as well as users of MH (just put next/prev/etc. there).

• URLs are clickable and open in your browser if you left-click them.

• You can use non-proportional fonts.

Text is only ever appended at the end of the buffer. However, tt tries to make sense of carriage-returns, so wget etc. will show proper progress bars.

Old-school line discipline editing with Backspace, C-w (delete last word) and C-u (delete all input) works well; readline editing of course doesn’t (most tab-completion systems will work, though).

If your cursor is not at the end of buffer, tt should behave like a simple text editor with Emacs-resembling keybindings. Home and End keys always move to the very top and very end of buffer.

You can set the tt window title with an xterm-compatible escape sequence, for example using:

label() {
    echo "$@" | awk '{printf("\033];%s\007", $0);}' >/dev/tty
}

There is a “ziconbeep” feature, that is, if there is any output while the window is iconfied, the window title is prefixed with three stars. (This has nothing much to do with what ziconbeep originally meant.)

If you sweep these commands either in the menu bar or the main window, they trigger special options:

Font       toggles the font between fixed and proportional
Font FNT   sets the font to FNT
Scroll     toggles autoscroll
Cut        deletes the current selection, keeping it as primary selection
Paste      pastes the primary selection at *insertion point*
Send       sends the current selection to the terminal
Clear      clears the terminal
Fwd        searches for the current selection
Fwd STR    searches for STR
/STR       searches for STR
Bwd        searches backward for the current selection
Bwd STR    searches backward for STR
?STR       searches backward for STR
Intr       sends SIGINT to the terminal
Quit       exits tt

All other swept text is sent to the terminal.

The commands Fwd, Bwd, Cut, Paste, Send, Clear, Font, Scroll also can be run from the right-button context menu.

Written by Christian Neukirchen <[email protected]> in 2012.

To the extent possible under law, Christian Neukirchen has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/