[davidad_]

I’m embodying an archetype here, but I can’t resist.

The use of QTermWidget makes this almost entirely an exercise in building a hello-world Qt app and very little about building a terminal. That is all very well if you are looking to learn Qt—which is by no means an unworthy aim—but I wouldn’t use the adjective “minimal” to describe any Qt app, no matter how short its main().

If you are actually looking for a minimal terminal, whose source code is intelligible and readily customizable, look no further than https://st.suckless.org/

[sjmulder]

Good suggestion! I found st a joy to read. Only a couple of C files, few frills and a straightforward coding style. I can see what the suckless folks are getting at.

Slightly OT here but I was thinking about what a suckless UI system would be like - one without excessive layering and as few moving parts as possible. I'm fairly sure it should be possible by avoiding truetype fonts and using the framebuffer directly. That would preclude ubiquitous animation but smooth scrolling and dragging is perfectly doable even with a single buffer.

[laumars]

They already have one:

https://dwm.suckless.org/

[speps]

> suckless UI system

What about IMGUI? https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

[racer-v]

What would be the win in avoiding TrueType? Seems like we could easily convert any TTF files to PostScript Type 1 if there were an advantage to be gained.

[jasonkostempski]

"That would preclude ubiquitous animation"

That would be its best feature.

[majewsky]

Yeah, I too was hoping for something substantital, e.g. a description of how to allocate and manage a pseudo-terminal (especially since I'll be needing that for a project of mine quite soon). I'll probably be looking at the st(1) source code, then.

[sjmulder]

I was experimenting with pty's just the other day. I needed only I/O and window size updates, so it turned out fairly succinct:

https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle/blob/master/tritty.c

I'm not at all an experienced Unix programmer though so take it with a grain of salt. Would be happy to hear about any defects or possible improvements.

[freedomben]

I came out of it feeling like it was a great foundation, and ready for me to hack and customize without having to start the project from scratch.

Suckless looks great tho. Thanks for the link!

[dang]

Ok, we swapped "minimal" for "QT" in the title above.

[slavik81]

It's Qt. The author writes it both ways, but lowercase 't' is correct. It's a tad bit weird to see it all uppercase. It's kinda like "Build your own WebApp using NODE".