A state machine powered, GPU accelerated Terminal for macOS.

trap2 is a terminal emulator for macOS that uses the GPU to render the terminal. It's built with OpenGL 4.1 Core Profile, GLFW 3, and libvterm, with a focus on simplicity and performance. Currently, this project is in a very unstable and it most likely won't even compile for you right now.

This is very much a work in progress, and I have a lot of ideas for the future:

• Integrate clipboard support
• Better testing harnesses

The development of this terminal emulator ties closely to my CS367 Systems Engineering class at George Mason University. One of the projects required me to implement a shell from scratch, so I decided to try and also build a basic terminal emulator. I've always been interested in terminal emulators, and I've always wanted to build one myself.

I'm perfectly content with the terminal I currently use, WezTerm, but I just wanted to experiment. This leads into the 3 limitations that I'm defining for this project (subject to change):

• No support for scrollback since I use tmux as my multiplexer
• No support for mouse input since I don't use the mouse in the terminal
• It'll really only be tested properly on macOS for now, this may change

• The program uses libvterm to handle the terminal state machine
• A multi-threaded GLFW setup is used to handle the input and rendering
  • The main thread handles opening the window and taking events
  • The render thread makes all of the OpenGL draw calls
  • The pty thread handles reading the child fork output
  • Minimal synchronization is needed or used to keep things fast
• Rendering is done using freetype2 and complex math to position glyphs

The project uses CMake as its build system. Install cmake and then run the following steps:

0. Define a configuration file, see doc/config.md for more details.
1. mkdir build && cd build
2. cmake ..
3. make

This should produce a binary in your build folder which you can run with ./build/trap2.

Copyright (c) 2023, Aarnav Tale