XtermSharp Terminal Emulator Engine

XtermSharp is a VT100/Xterm terminal emulator engine for .NET. It is designed to be agnostic of both front-ends (UI toolkits) and back-ends (data sources).

Key architectural points:

• Engine Agnostic: The core engine does not handle connecting to processes or remote servers. It only processes terminal data.
• Data Input: To send data to the terminal, you must pass a byte array to the Feed method.
• Integration: Consumers typically use higher-level implementations that integrate the engine with specific UI toolkits (e.g., Cocoa/Mac or Terminal.Gui).

The core XtermSharp engine does not automatically connect to a process or a remote server. To display data in the terminal, you must manually feed data into it by passing a byte array to the Feed method.

While the core engine requires manual data feeding, convenience classes are available to spawn a subprocess and connect the terminal to a local process, including options to customize environment variables for the child process.

// Conceptual usage of the Feed method
// terminal is an instance of the XtermSharp engineyte[] data = GetDataFromProcess();
terminal.Feed(data);

XtermSharp.Mac is a library built on top of XtermSharp specifically for macOS. It provides an NSView that can be embedded directly into macOS applications to provide a terminal interface.

Key details:

• Input Mapping: It automatically maps macOS user input to send the appropriate data to the underlying XtermSharp terminal.
• Backend Responsibility: Like the core engine, XtermSharp.Mac does not wire the terminal to a backend or a process; you must implement the connection to a shell or process in your own code.
• Reference Implementation: You can refer to the MacTerminal project for an example of how to connect a Unix shell process to the Mac implementation.

Supported Features

• Interactive Applications: Supports running Emacs, vi, top, mc, blessed, and gui.cs.
• Input: Supports both keyboard and mouse interaction.
• Unicode: Provides decent Unicode handling (though Grapheme cluster support is a future roadmap item).

Current Limitations

• Scrollback and Reflow: These features are currently missing.
• Platform Differences: Some features are only available in the Mac version; the text-based version using curses has certain limitations.