Casciian Terminal Component

Optional component for the Casciian text user interface library that provides an ECMA-48 / ANSI X3.64 style terminal emulator and the widgets built on top of it.

This project lives under code-terminal-component/ and is independent from the main code/ project. It is published separately to Maven Central, so applications can opt in only when they actually need it.

Why a separate component?

The terminal emulator (casciian.terminal.ECMA48) and the TTerminalWindow widget represent a specific use case: embedding a terminal that runs a shell or child process, or rendering "ANSI Art" through a full terminal emulator. That code — and the dependencies it tends to pull in for spawning and driving child processes — is not useful for the majority of applications, and it noticeably increases the size of the core library.

Keeping this functionality in a separate component means the core stays small and focused. Applications that need an embedded terminal add a single extra dependency; everyone else keeps a leaner core.

What's in here?

• casciian-terminal-component — the component itself, packaged as a JPMS module casciian.terminal.component. It depends on casciian. It provides:
  • casciian.terminal — the terminal emulator and its supporting types (ECMA48, DisplayLine, TerminalListener, TerminalState, DECCharacterSets).
  • casciian.terminal.widget — the Casciian widgets that expose the emulator:
    • TTerminal / TTerminalWindow — an embedded terminal running a shell or a custom command line.
    • TTextPicture / TTextPictureWindow — (deprecated) display "ANSI Art" using the full terminal emulator. Prefer casciian.TTextAnsi / casciian.TTextAnsiWindow in core for simpler ANSI rendering.
• demo — a small TUI application demonstrating the component. Its File → OS Shell item opens a TTerminalWindow running your shell. Built as a fat JAR via the jarDemo task.

Building

The project uses Gradle (wrapper included). At build time it uses a Gradle composite build to substitute the published io.github.crramirez:casciian artifact with the sibling project under ../code, so you don't need to publish a SNAPSHOT first to build locally:

cd code-terminal-component
./gradlew build

To produce the demo fat JAR:

./gradlew :demo:jarDemo
java -jar demo/build/libs/casciian-terminal-component-demo-<version>.jar

The fat JAR bundles the demo, the component, the core casciian library and all runtime dependencies (including JLine), so it can be run standalone.

Using the component in your application

Once published, add it as a dependency alongside core casciian:

dependencies {
    implementation "io.github.crramirez:casciian:<version>"
    implementation "io.github.crramirez:casciian-terminal-component:<version>"
}

Then open a terminal window from your TApplication:

import casciian.TWindow;
import casciian.terminal.widget.TTerminalWindow;

// Spawn the user's shell in a resizable window at (0, 0).
new TTerminalWindow(application, 0, 0, TWindow.RESIZABLE);

License

Apache License, Version 2.0. See the project LICENSE.