Graphical front-end (GUI-TUI Bridge)

[o-sdn-o]

• Keyboard-only access, Keyboard-only access #86
• Character Matrix Unicode Character Geometry Modifiers
• Extended grapheme clusters
• Pixel graphics, Pixel graphics in terminal #164
• GUI mode
  • Win32
  • X11
  • macOS
  • Wayland
• Multiple text cursors
• TSF integration
• Multi-focus
• Hyperlinks
• Sound

[o-sdn-o]

We need to render a glyph raster of size (MX+2)x(MY+2) with border outer glyphs around the visible raster. When rendering the glyph raster, we need two layers:
- Bottom layer for cell contents.
- Top layer for outer tails and squiggles of glyphs extending beyond the cell.

Each glyph consists of what falls inside the cell and the tails around it, and they are should be drawn in the following order:
- First, the entire first layer with the filled cell bodies is drawn.
- Then the layer with the glyph tails is drawn on top of the filled cell bodies.

For the first prototype I will be testing something called Shingled Cell Rendering (a-la SMR for hard drives). For a final image of 1200x1000 pixels for a 120x50 grid with a 10x20 pixel cell, an intermediate buffer of 3600x3000 pixels is required. Each cell stores empty space around itself for hanging elements, increasing its size by three times along each axis, which will be 30x60 pixels per cell.

Shingled Cell Rendering is done in two stages.
- First, the background and cores of all cells (10x20) in a row are drawn.
- Then, the space around each cell is rendered on top.

The caret, which is a cell-wise SGR attribute, must be rendered as an SGR attribute.

[o-sdn-o]

You can play with a prototype of the vtm graphical window (gui-bridge branch) on various Windows platforms starting with Win8.1 (including Window Server 2019 Core).

If vtm is launched from a graphical shell, or through the start vtm.exe command, then it automatically turns on the graphical mode.

screen_record_Thu_04.18.2024__3-02-53.76.mp4

The vtm server starts in the background, despite the fact that its interface is not yet rendered.