Fbterm
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Fbterm (Frame buffer terminal emulator) is standalone replacement of Linux kernel terminal that can function outside of Xorg.
Contents
Features
From http://code.google.com/p/fbterm/:
- FbTerm is a fast terminal emulator for linux with frame buffer device or VESA video card. Features include:
- mostly as fast as terminal of linux kernel while accelerated scrolling is enabled
- select font with fontconfig and draw text with freetype2, same as Qt/Gtk+ based GUI apps
- dynamically create/destroy up to 10 windows initially running default shell
- record scroll-back history for every window
- auto-detect text encoding with current locale, support double width scripts like Chinese, Japanese etc
- switch between configurable additional text encodings with hot keys on the fly
- copy/past selected text between windows with mouse when gpm server is running
- change the orientation of screen display, a.k.a. screen rotation
- lightweight input method framework with client-server architecture
- background image for eye candy
Installation
Fbterm is available in the package fbterm.
After installation, mind the additional instructions:
==> To run fbterm as a non-root user, do: sudo gpasswd -a YOUR_USERNAME video ==> To enable keyboard shortcuts for non-root users, do: sudo setcap 'cap_sys_tty_config+ep' /usr/bin/fbterm or sudo chmod u+s /usr/bin/fbterm
Customization
Fonts
Fbterm uses fontconfig for a list of fonts, trying each sequentially until it is able to render the characters.
To change the fonts that are used, use the --font-names
option to select favorites from the list given by fc-list
.
Input method support
Fbterm supports diverse input methods by acting as a client for an independent input method framework server. Several such programs are available for Arch, see Internationalization#Input methods in Xorg.
Tips and tricks
Background image
To use a background image, Fbterm can be set to take a screen shot of the frame buffer device when it starts.
The following script (using the fbv image viewer) is recommended in the man page:
#!/bin/bash # fbterm-bi: a wrapper script to enable background image with fbterm # usage: fbterm-bi /path/to/image fbterm-options echo -ne "\e[?25l" # hide cursor fbv -ciuker "$1" << EOF q EOF shift export FBTERM_BACKGROUND_IMAGE=1 exec /bin/fbterm "$@"
White font color
By default, fbterm display the "white" text as a gray color, even using the -f 7 switch. Its possible to get real white by doing an echo once inside fbterm, like this
echo -en "\e]P7ffffff"