ROTE 0.2.8

ROTE is a simple C library for VT102 terminal emulation. It allows the programmer to set up virtual screens and send them data.

The virtual screens will emulate the behavior of a VT102 terminal, interpreting escape sequences, control characters and such. The library supports ncurses as well so that you may render the virtual screen to the real screen when you need to.

There are several programs that do terminal emulation, such as xterm, rxvt, screen and even the Linux console driver itself.

However, it is not easy to isolate their terminal emulation logic and put it in a module that can be easily reused in other programs. Thats where the ROTE library comes in.

The goal of the ROTE library is to provide terminal emulation support for C/C++ applications, making it possible to write programs that display terminals in embedded windows within them, or even monitor the display produced by other programs.

The ROTE library does not depend on any other library (except libc, of course), and ncurses support can be enabled or disabled at compile-time.

With ncurses support compiled in, the ROTE library is able to render the virtual screens to the physical screen (actually any ncurses window) and can also translate ncurses key codes to the escape sequences the Linux console would have produced (and feed them into the terminal).

Ncurses support is not mandatory however, and ROTE will work fine without it, but in that case the application must take care of drawing the terminal to the screen in whichever way it sees fit.

ROTE also encapsulates the functionality needed to execute a child process using the virtual screen as the controlling terminal. It will handle the creation of the pseudo-terminal and the child process.

All the application has to do is tell it the command to run in the terminal and call an update function at regular intervals to allow the terminal to update itself.