Lambda-Term is a cross-platform library for manipulating the
terminal. It provides an abstraction for keys, mouse events, colors,
as well as a set of widgets to write curses-like applications.

The main objective of Lambda-Term is to provide a higher level
functional interface to terminal manipulation than, for example,
ncurses, by providing a native OCaml interface instead of bindings to
a C library.

Lambda-Term integrates with zed to provide text edition facilities in
console applications.

API Documentation

Installation

To build and install Lambda-Term:

$ dune build
$ dune install

Note that this will build Lambda-Term using the development build
profile which has strict compilation flags. If the build fails, try
passing --profile=release to dune or alternatively create a
dune-workspace file with the following contents:

(lang dune 1.1)
(profile release)

HTML API Documentation (optional)

To build the documentation:

$ dune build @doc

You can then consult it by openning
_build/default/_doc/_html/index.html.

Tests (optional)

To build and execute tests:

$ dune runtest

Examples (optional)

To build the examples:

$ dune build @examples

Binaries for the examples will be in _build/default/examples.

The asciiart example is not built by default as it as an additional
dependency on the camlimages library. To build it run:

$ dune build examples/asciiart/asciiart.exe

Terminal emulators compatibility

All terminal emulators behave differently, especially regarding how
keystrokes are reported to the application on its standard
input. Lambda-Term tries to handle all of them, but it may happen that
a particular key of combination of keys is not recognized by
Lambda-Term, and thus does not produce the expected effect (for
example: arrow keys or backspace not working).

To check what is reported by your terminal you can run the script
print_sequences.ml which at the root of the repository:

$ ocaml print_sequences.ml
press 'q' to quit
\027[A
\027[D
\027[C
\027[A
\027[D
a
z
e
q

You can then send the result to jeremie@dimino.org, including:

• the application you are using as terminal emulator,

• the contents of the TERM environment variable inside the terminal (echo $TERM),

• the output of print_sequences.ml with, for each line, the keystroke.

Key bindings

Key bindings can be set in ~/.config/lambda-term-inputrc. See
lambda-term-inputrc. Useful mappings:

# This allows zsh-like searching the history by pressing up/down
[read-line]
up: history-search-prev
down: history-search-next

Main modules

• LTerm: basic interface to the terminal, it allows to put the terminal
  in raw mode, hide the cursor, render an offscreen array of points, ...

• LTerm_draw: drawing functions, for rendering in an offscreen array.

• LTerm_read_line: line edition.

• LTerm_inputrc: parsing of configurations files for key bindings.

• LTerm_history: history and history file management.

• LTerm_ui: helpers for writing full-screen applications.

• LTerm_widget: widget system (not stable).

• LTerm_resources: resources loading for widgets.