terminal_view 0.5.0

A fast terminal emulator widget for Flutter, with a VT100/xterm-compatible parser and a renderer built for mobile.

terminal_view

A fast terminal emulator widget for Flutter. Feed it bytes from a shell, an SSH channel or a PTY and it draws a real terminal: VT100/xterm escape sequences, scrollback, selection, mouse reporting and IME input.

It is the terminal inside Termphin and is built for phones first, but it has no dependency on the app.

Install

dependencies:
  terminal_view: ^0.4.0

Usage

import 'package:terminal_view/terminal_view.dart';

final terminal = Terminal();

// What the user types. Send it to your shell or SSH channel.
terminal.onOutput = (data) => channel.write(data);

// What the remote side sends back.
terminal.write('Hello, world!\r\n');

Widget build(BuildContext context) => TerminalView(terminal);

Terminal is the emulator and does not depend on Flutter, so you can test it or run it in an isolate on its own. TerminalView paints it.

Selection

final controller = TerminalController();

TerminalView(terminal, controller: controller);

final range = controller.selection;
final text = range == null ? null : terminal.buffer.getText(range);

A long press selects a word and a drag extends it. Blank cells can be selected too.

Appearance

TerminalView(
  terminal,
  theme: TerminalThemes.defaultTheme,
  textStyle: const TerminalStyle(fontSize: 14, fontFamily: 'JetBrainsMono'),
  cursorType: TerminalCursorType.block,
)

Example

example/ runs TerminalView against a small shell written in Dart, so it works anywhere without a PTY:

cd example && flutter run

Benchmarks

dart run benchmark/terminal_benchmark.dart

This measures parsing and buffer throughput on the plain Dart VM. Painting is not included.

Fork of xterm.dart

terminal_view started as a fork of xterm.dart 4.0.0. The parser, buffer and input handling work the same way. The main changes are in rendering:

• Writes are batched once per frame.
• Runs of cells with the same style are drawn together.
• Lines that stop changing are cached and replayed.
• The cursor blinks without rebuilding the widget.

Porting is mostly a matter of changing the import, but the API is not identical and versions are numbered separately.

License

MIT. See LICENSE and NOTICE.