Termite

A keyboard-centric VTE-based terminal, aimed at use within a window manager with tiling and/or tabbing support.

Termite looks for the configuration file in the following order: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/termite/config, ~/.config/termite/config, $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/termite/config, /etc/xdg/termite/config.

Termite's exit status is 1 on a failure, including a termination of the child process from an uncaught signal. Otherwise the exit status is that of the child process.

About this fork

notice

The old contents of thise file are available in README.old.rst.

The original authors of Termite are now recommending Alacritty, which is indeed a fine terminal emulator; but it has a few shortcomings:

Alacritty requires an OpenGL capable graphics card. While software rendering is possible, it is considerably slower. Termite can be used comfortably in systems without hardware accelerated graphics.
While Alacritty's hints mode can be configured to behave similarly to Termite, it is not exactly the same. Some people may still prefer the user experience provided by Termite.
Termite is written in C++, which is more widely supported than Rust. Alacritty currently does not work on architectures and operating systems where a Rust compiler is not available.

Adrián Pérez tried to contact the main author offering to continue development, without receiving a reply. While the original Termite authors discourage forking and contributing to Alacritty instead, we believe that there are reasons for Termite to continue existing, and plan to continue maintenance. If you were planning on improving Termite but were discouraged for lack of an active upstream, please do consider contributing to this fork.

DEPENDENCIES

A slightly modified version of VTE exposing the necessary functions for keyboard text selection and URL hints is built into Termite as a Meson subproject, and is included in packaged releases.

This means that you will need the dependencies needed to build VTE in order to build Termite:

Fribidi
GPerf
GTK+ 3.0
GnuTLS
PCRE2
libsystemd

If no browser is configured and $BROWSER is unset, xdg-open from xdg-utils is used as a fallback.

BUILDING

git clone https://github.com/aperezdc/termite.git
meson setup build termite
meson compile -C build

INSTALLING

meson install -C build --skip-subprojects vte

Packagers may want to add --destdir=… to the above command.

KEYBINDINGS

INSERT MODE

`ctrl-shift-x`	activate url hints mode
`ctrl-shift-r`	reload configuration file
`ctrl-shift-c`	copy to CLIPBOARD
`ctrl-shift-v`	paste from CLIPBOARD
`ctrl-shift-u`	unicode input (standard GTK binding)
`ctrl-tab`	start scrollback completion
`ctrl-shift-space`	start selection mode
`ctrl-shift-t`	open terminal in the current directory¹
`ctrl-shift-up`	scroll up a line
`ctrl-shift-down`	scroll down a line
`shift-pageup`	scroll up a page
`shift-pagedown`	scroll down a page
`ctrl-shift-l`	reset and clear
`ctrl-+`	increase font size
`ctrl--`	decrease font size
`ctrl-=`	reset font size to default

SELECTION MODE

`q` or `escape` or `ctrl-[`	enter insert mode
`x`	activate url hints mode
`v`	visual mode
`V`	visual line mode
`ctrl-v`	visual block mode
`hjkl` or arrow keys	[count] move cursor left/down/up/right
`w` or `shift-right`	[count] forward word
`e`	[count] forward to end of word
`b` or `shift-left`	[count] backward word
`W` or `ctrl-right`	[count] forward WORD (non-whitespace)
`E`	[count] forward to end of WORD (non-whitespace)
`B` or `ctrl-left`	[count] backward WORD (non-whitespace)
`H`	jump to the top of the screen
`M`	jump to the middle of the screen
`L`	jump to the bottom of the screen
`0` or `home`	move cursor to the first column in the row
`^`	beginning-of-line (first non-blank character)
`$` or `end`	end-of-line
`g`	jump to start of first row
`G`	jump to start of last row
`ctrl-u`	[count] move cursor a half screen up
`ctrl-d`	[count] move cursor a half screen down
`ctrl-b`	[count] move cursor a full screen up (back)
`ctrl-f`	[count] move cursor a full screen down (forward)
`y`	copy to CLIPBOARD
`/`	forward search
`?`	reverse search
`u`	[count] forward url search
`U`	[count] reverse url search
`o`	open the current selection as a url
`Return`	open the current selection as a url and enter insert mode
`n`	[count] next search match
`N`	[count] previous search match
`ctrl-+`	increase font size
`ctrl--`	decrease font size
`ctrl-=`	reset font size to default

During scrollback search, the current selection is changed to the search match and copied to the PRIMARY clipboard buffer.

With the text input widget focused, up/down (or tab/shift-tab) cycle through completions, escape closes the widget and enter accepts the input.

In hints mode, the input will be accepted as soon as termite considers it a unique match.

PADDING

Internal padding can be added by using CSS to style Termite. Adding the following snippet to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (or ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css) will add uniform 2px padding around the edges:

.termite {
    padding: 2px;
}

This can also be used to add varying amounts of padding to each side via standard usage of the CSS padding property.

TERMINFO

Termite v15.1 and newer do not use a custom terminfo anymore; the built-in VTE behaviour of using xterm-256color is kept. When working on a remote system with this terminfo entry missing, an error might occur:

Error opening terminal: xterm-256color

To solve this issue, install the package that provides terminfo entries on your remote system. Typically those are shipped as part of the ncurses package.

For example, on Arch Linux:

pacman -S ncurses

The directory can be set by a process running in the terminal. For example:

if [[ ${VTE_VERSION:-0} -ge 3405 ]]; then
  . /etc/profile.d/vte.sh
  __vte_osc7
fi

↩

aperezdc / termite