QTermWidget

Overview

A terminal emulator widget for Qt 6.

QTermWidget is an open-source project originally based on the KDE4 Konsole application, but it took its own direction later on. The main goal of this project is to provide a Unicode-enabled, embeddable Qt widget for using as a built-in console (or terminal emulation widget).

It is compatible with BSD, Linux and OS X.

This project is licensed under the terms of the GPLv2 or any later version. See the LICENSE file for the full text of the license. Some files are published under compatible licenses:

Files: example/main.cpp
       lib/TerminalCharacterDecoder.cpp
       lib/TerminalCharacterDecoder.h
       lib/kprocess.cpp
       lib/kprocess.h
       lib/kpty.cpp
       lib/kpty.h
       lib/kpty_p.h
       lib/kptydevice.cpp
       lib/kptydevice.h
       lib/kptyprocess.cpp
       lib/kptyprocess.h
       lib/qtermwidget.cpp
       lib/qtermwidget.h
       lib/qtermwidget_interface.h
Copyright: Author Adriaan de Groot <groot@kde.org>
           2010, KDE e.V <kde-ev-board@kde.org>
           2002-2007, Oswald Buddenhagen <ossi@kde.org>
           2006-2008, Robert Knight <robertknight@gmail.com>
           2002, Waldo Bastian <bastian@kde.org>
           2008, e_k <e_k@users.sourceforge.net>
           2022, Francesc Martinez <info@francescmm.com>
License: LGPL-2+

Files: cmake/FindUtf8Proc.cmake
Copyright: 2009-2011, Kitware, Inc
           2009-2011, Philip Lowman <philip@yhbt.com>
License: BSD-3-clause

Installation

Compiling sources

The only runtime dependency is qtbase ≥ 6.6.0. Build dependencies are as follows:

CMake ≥ 3.16.0 serves as the build system and therefore needs to be present to compile.
lxqt-build-tools ≥ 2.0.0 is also needed for compilation.
Git is needed to optionally pull latest VCS checkouts.

Code configuration is handled by CMake. CMake variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX will normally have to be set to /usr, depending on the way library paths are dealt with on 64bit systems. Variables like CMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR may have to be set as well.

To build, run make. To install, run make install which accepts variable DESTDIR as usual.

To build PyQt bindings, build this library first, and then invoke sip-wheel in pyqt/ directory. Environment variables CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS can be used to specify non-installed or non-standard directories for headers and shared libraries, and the built Python wheel can be installed by standard tools like pip. See the CI script for a complete example.

Binary packages

The library is provided by all major Linux distributions. This includes Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and all of their children, given they use the same package repositories. Just use the distributions' package managers to search for string qtermwidget.

Translation

Translations can be done in LXQt-Weblate

API

Public Types

Type	Variable
enum	ScrollBarPosition { NoScrollBar, ScrollBarLeft, ScrollBarRight }
enum	KeyboardCursorShape { BlockCursor, UnderlineCursor, IBeamCursor }

Properties

flowControlEnabled : bool
getPtySlaveFd : const int
getShellPID : int
getForegroundProcessId : int
getTerminalFont : QFont
historyLinesCount : int
icon : const QString
keyBindings : QString
screenColumnsCount : int
selectedText(bool preserveLineBreaks = true) : QString
sizeHint : const QSize
terminalSizeHint : bool
title : const QString
wordCharacters : QString
workingDirectory : QString

Public Functions

Type	Function
	QTermWidget(int startnow = 1, QWidget *parent = 0)
virtual	~QTermWidget()
void	changeDir(const QString &dir)
void	getSelectionEnd(int &row, int &column)
void	getSelectionStart(int &row, int &column)
void	scrollToEnd()
void	sendText(QString &text)
void	setArgs(QStringList &args)
void	setAutoClose(bool enabled)
void	setColorScheme(const QString &name)
void	setEnvironment(const QStringList &environment)
void	setFlowControlEnabled(bool enabled)
void	setFlowControlWarningEnabled(bool enabled)
void	setHistorySize(int lines)
void	setKeyboardCursorShape(QTermWidget::KeyboardCursorShape shape)
void	setMonitorActivity(bool enabled)
void	setMonitorSilence(bool enabled)
void	setMotionAfterPasting(int action)
void	setScrollBarPosition(QTermWidget::ScrollBarPosition pos)
void	setSelectionEnd(int row, int column)
void	setSelectionStart(int row, int column)
void	setShellProgram(const QString &program)
void	setSilenceTimeout(int seconds)
void	setTerminalFont(QFont &font)
void	setTerminalOpacity(qreal level)
void	setTerminalSizeHint(bool enabled)
void	setWorkingDirectory(const QString &dir)
void	startShellProgram()
void	startTerminalTeletype()
QStringList	availableColorSchemes()

Public Slots

Type	Function
void	copyClipboard()
void	pasteClipboard()
void	pasteSelection()
void	zoomIn()
void	zoomOut()
void	setSize(const QSize &)
void	setKeyBindings(const QString &kb)
void	clear()
void	toggleShowSearchBar()

Signals

Type	Function
void	activity()
void	bell(const QString &message)
void	copyAvailable(bool)
void	finished()
void	profileChanged(const QString &profile)
void	receivedData(const QString &text)
void	sendData(const char*, int)
void	silence()
void	termGetFocus()
void	termKeyPressed(QKeyEvent*)
void	termLostFocus()
void	titleChanged()
void	urlActivated(const QUrl &, bool fromContextMenu)

Static Public Members

Type	Function
static QStringList	availableColorSchemes()
static QStringList	availableKeyBindings()
static void	addCustomColorSchemeDir(const QString &custom_dir)

Protected Functions

Type	Function
virtual void	resizeEvent(QResizeEvent*)

Protected Slots

Type	Function
void	sessionFinished()
void	selectionChanged(bool textSelected)

Member Type Documentation

enum QTermWidget::ScrollBarPosition
This enum describes the location where the scroll bar is positioned in the display widget when calling QTermWidget::setScrollBarPosition().

Constant	Value	Description
QTermWidget::NoScrollBar	0x0	Do not show the scroll bar.
QTermWidget::ScrollBarLeft	0x1	Show the scroll bar on the left side of the display.
QTermWidget::ScrollBarRight	0x2	Show the scroll bar on the right side of the display.

enum QTermWidget::KeyboardCursorShape
This enum describes the available shapes for the keyboard cursor when calling QTermWidget::setKeyboardCursorShape().

Constant	Value	Description
QTermWidget::BlockCursor	0x0	A rectangular block which covers the entire area of the cursor character.
QTermWidget::UnderlineCursor	0x1	A single flat line which occupies the space at the bottom of the cursor character's area.
QTermWidget::IBeamCursor	0x2	A cursor shaped like the capital letter 'I', similar to the IBeam cursor used in Qt/KDE text editors.

Property Documentation

flowControlEnabled : bool
Returns whether flow control is enabled.

getPtySlaveFd : const int
Returns a pty slave file descriptor. This can be used for display and control a remote terminal.

getForegroundProcessId : int
Returns the PID of the foreground process. This is initially the same as processId() but can change as the user starts other programs inside the terminal. If there is a problem reading the foreground process id, 0 will be returned.

historyLinesCount : int
Returns the number of lines in the history buffer.

keyBindings : QString
Returns current key bindings.

selectedText(bool preserveLineBreaks = true) : QString
Returns the currently selected text.

wordCharacters : QString
When selecting text by word, consider these characters to be word characters in addition to alphanumeric characters, default is :@-./_~.

Member Function Documentation

void changeDir(const QString &dir)
Attempt to change shell directory (Linux only).

void clear()
Clear the terminal content and move to home position.

void copyClipboard()
Copy selection to clipboard.

void pasteClipboard()
Paste clipboard to terminal.

void pasteSelection()
Paste selection to terminal.

void receivedData(const QString &text)
Signals that we received new data from the process running in the terminal emulator.

void scrollToEnd()
Wrapped, scroll to end of text.

void sendData(const char*, int)
Emitted when emulator send data to the terminal process (redirected for external recipient). It can be used for control and display the remote terminal.

void sendText(QString &text)
Send text to terminal.

void setArgs(QStringList &args)
Sets the shell program arguments, default is none.

void setAutoClose(bool enabled)
Automatically close the terminal session after the shell process exits or keep it running.

void setColorScheme(const QString &name)
Sets the color scheme, default is white on black.

void setEnvironment(const QStringList &environment)
Sets environment variables.

void setFlowControlEnabled(bool enabled)
Sets whether flow control is enabled.

void setFlowControlWarningEnabled(bool enabled)
Sets whether the flow control warning box should be shown when the flow control stop key (Ctrl+S) is pressed.

void setHistorySize(int lines)
History size for scrolling.

void setKeyBindings(const QString &kb)
Set named key binding for given widget.

void setKeyboardCursorShape(QTermWidget::KeyboardCursorShape shape)
Sets the shape of the keyboard cursor. This is the cursor drawn at the position in the terminal where keyboard input will appear.

void setScrollBarPosition(QTermWidget::ScrollBarPosition pos)
Sets presence and position of scrollbar.

void setShellProgram(const QString &program)
Sets the shell program, default is /bin/bash.

void setTerminalFont(QFont &font)
Sets terminal font. Default is application font with family Monospace, size 10. Beware of a performance penalty and display/alignment issues when using a proportional font.

void setTerminalSizeHint(bool enabled)
Exposes TerminalDisplay::TerminalSizeHint.

void startShellProgram()
Starts shell program if it was not started in constructor.

void startTerminalTeletype()
Starts terminal teletype as is and redirect data for external recipient. It can be used for display and control a remote terminal.

void zoomIn()
Zooms in on the text.

void zoomOut()
Zooms out in on the text.

lxqt/qtermwidget