1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
|
Quick and dirty uuterm README file:
First and foremost, uuterm is EXPERIMENTAL software. It may crash or
do bad things. An effort has been made to have it exit gracefully on
fatal errors; however, in some cases the Linux console may be left in
a nonresponsive state (hopefully not possible anymore). Having the
"magic sysrq key" or "SAK" configured in your kernel will be a great
help if this happens! I also recommend running "screen" inside uuterm
so that, if it does crash, you don't lose your work.
Second, at this time uuterm only supports Linux fbcon as its display
target. Porting to other framebuffer devices should be easy.
With that said, building is just a matter of running "make". If you
need special CFLAGS options or a nondefault compiler (CC), put them in
a file named config.mak and they will automatically be used. Should be
self-explanatory.
To run uuterm, set the environment variable UUTERM_FONT to point to a
UCF font file and run "uuterm". A sample UCF font file is available at
http://brightrain.aerifal.cx/~dalias/sample.ucf.gz and has support for
ASCII, Thai, Tibetan, and Japanese text. Tools to make UCF fonts from
other source formats will be available soon.
By default uuterm runs the default SHELL when started. If you want it
to directly run another program, simply put the name of the program on
the command line, followed by any arguments.
The idea of uuterm:
Use of any/all of the world's scripts and languages on *nix should not
be limited to fancy gui applications. Proper rendering of text is
needed all the way down to the console level, and it should not depend
on huge library frameworks or outline fonts.
In this light, uuterm is an experiment to demonstrate that supporting
"complex" scripts need not be complex; all that's needed is some
natural, logical extensions to ancient bitmap font technology to
account for the fact that glyphs and characters are not the same
thing.
While display in uuterm is already very "advanced" by terminal
emulator standards, keyboard support is very poor. US keyboard layout
is presently hardcoded in fbcon.c. Eventually I will migrate this to a
more flexible framework.
Script support:
- Indic scripts are _almost_ supported by the UCF font system alone,
but need some minor additional support for reordering. This will be
implemented in the near future, if all goes well.
- RTL/bidi scripts will not render properly. I personally don't believe
there is any sane way to render them properly at the terminal level,
but I will eventually implement algorithms that might work
reasonably for some users.
- All other (LTR) scripts should be fully supported using the
"advanced" combining and contextual glyph-selection abilities of the
UCF font format (details to come later, along with tools).
|
