literm is a terminal emulator for Linux first and foremost, but it is also usable elsewhere (on Mac). The design goal is to be simplistic while still providing a reasonable amount of features.
If you'd like to talk to people using literm, feel free to pop onto #literm on freenode.
This probably won't eat your homework, but I'd treat it with a dose of caution all the same. It has seen a fair amount of real world use through fingerterm, but there may still be bugs lurking.
This having been said, feel free to give it a shot and file bugs - ideally with pull requests, but at the least with as much information about how to reproduce them as possible.
literm is implemented using QML to provide a fast, and fluid user interface. The terminal emulator side is in C++ (also using Qt). It is exposed as a plugin to allow reuse in other applications or contexts.
qmake && make
.. should get you most of the way there, assuming you have qmake & Qt easily available. After that, run:
./literm
literm started off life as fingerterm, a terminal emulator designed for touch-based interaction, written by Heikki Holstila for the Nokia N9 and Jolla's Sailfish OS devices.
I decided to take it a bit further, specifically: giving it a desktop-friendly interface, adding some odd features here and there, and fixing things up as I found them.
It is also partly inspired by Yat, a terminal emulator by Jørgen Lind, but it does not share any code from it.