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single-file terminal emulator (library) written in C11.

Features

• Lightweight - as low as 60KB binary size with <10MB RAM usage
• Customizable - over 80 configurable macros that actually affect performance
• One-size-fits-all - can be used on everything from microcontrollers to daily-driven machines
• (Almost) dependency-free - dependencies are minimized with crucial ones being inlined.
• Capable - supports Kitty graphics, Sixel images, True Color, font fallbacks, styled and colored underlines.
• Smooth - supports multiple 'eye-candy' features: buffer transitions, cursor trail, etc.

Platforms

Currently, sfte only supports Wayland as a native experience. That being said, custom backends are supported, allowing it to be ported to anything as easily as possible.

Planned supported platforms are:

• macOS,
• X11 for legacy support,
• sokol for easy game engine embedding.

Installing

Prerequisites

• Any C compiler supporting C11+ standard
• Development headers for wayland-client and xkbcommon

Getting started

1. Clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/nihiL7331/sfte.git --depth=1
cd sfte

2. Compile the build binary (nob).

cc nob.c -o nob

3. Run the build binary with the install argument.

./nob install

Customization

sfte relies heavily on customization. By default, it comes with minimal, sensible configuration.

It is configured by defining macros inside config.c, taking inspiration from st. When you build the project for the first time, a config.c is generated. A complete description of all override macros can be found directly inside sfte.h.

When any changes are done, sfte needs to be recompiled for it to apply.

Why handle the customization this way?

It's extremely simple. No parsing is needed, and everything is handled during the compilation time. It allows the compiler to strip away any disabled portions of code, maximizing the performance. The terminal only does what it has to do, nothing more.

It also fits the single-file premise of this project, to compile and run sfte all that is needed are the prerequisites, nob binary, sfte.h and config.c. There's no massive 100MB artifact, so everything e.g. can be stored in a dotfiles repository.

Dependencies

sfte tries to use as few dependencies as possible. There are still a couple of mandatory ones, which were hard to get rid of, hence they got inlined.

• stb_truetype.h
• stb_image.h
• tiny-regex-c (for non-POSIX builds)

License

zlib license.