ToeTerm support thread

Applications
#1

Greetings!

I’m the (current) author of ToeTerm, and I thought it was time to finally create a support thread here in the forum.

At the time of writing, the newest version is 1.9.10, which contains two (three) significant improvements:

A most welcome fix is implementing the back tab ANSI sequence. It is used in many places, and its missing support has causes (at least) visual corruption. Take nano text editor for example; you open a text file, go to end to a long line of text (multiple screens wide) and start deleting the text using backspace. The cursor jumps left and right, and pieces of text seem to be here and there; this is both annoying, but it can prevent editing the file altogether on-device! Now that ‘Z’ sequence is handled properly, editing long lines of text is a lot more possible - and even somewhat convenient! There is also ‘X’ sequence implemented, which may be used by certain eritors or commands, but I haven’t noticed its absence. Please let me know if you know an example so I can test it!

These doesn’t fix row-level issues with, say, using pkcon to install/remove packages, where the terminal is too narrow, and the text wraps to the next line. Better way to handle those situations is to turn the device into landscape orientation, or use font size so small the width exceeds the golden value of 80 characters.

You can now use 16-color, 256-color and 24-bit-mode colors to brighten up your terminal like so:

  • \033[91m (16-color index)
  • \033[48;5;9m (256-color index)
  • \033[48;2;255;0;0m (24-bit color RGB)

Note that Jolla doesn’t ship with the most suitable terminfo file for ToeTerm, xterm-direct256, so auto detection may fail regarding the 24-bit color mode. However, I uploaded the binary file to GitHub, so you can copy it to ~/.terminfo/x/ and set TERM=xterm-direct256 until I make the installer take care of it. (Perhaps I should make it a separate package instead…) There are also some test scripts to print out all the pretty colors your terminal emulator of choice possibly can!

Please test the new release out and let me know what you think! I’m not a terminal emulator expert, but I can always try to help!

I have a few improvements in the works, so stay tuned!

12 Likes
#2

Thank you for this. I first appreciated Toeterm for it’s “no delay” screen timeout option, but moved away from it as I started to use more cli programs, (mutt, “ohh my” programs, nnn), because of things like color support.

Will test…

What I really would like is keyboard improvements, (bigger, f-keys, etc), and possibly some support for high-def image previews, (probably a pretty big deal without X)…

#3

There’s an old app, “Karin Console”, which is kind of buggy, but seemed to be on the rightrack, (supports glyphs, touch support, uses jolla keyboard), but hasn’t been developed for a few years… Could be some useful things in there.

I buillt for aarch64, but don’t know enough to do more…

#4

So far, I notice that image previews, (with Viu, nnn, etc), don’t show at all, (it’s just black and white lines on the screen). Also, one nice thing about Literm, by @Kabouik, is that you can scroll by swiping. I’m not sure what code causes that, but maybe he can help.

#5

Thanks for letting me know about viu, it really is quite something! It sure displays only b/w bars with COLORTERM=truecolor (value 24-bit doesn’t seem to work), so I’ll have to dig a bit deeper.

Could you push the aarch64 package to OpenRepos or Chum? I have no idea how to make an existing Rust project compile in SDK, nor how to make it a RPM package…

#6

Welp, it turned out my armv7hl device had an older ToeTerm installed :sweat_smile:

I can get a “pretty” image with TERM=xterm-256color and COLORTERM=truecolor, so could you try with those values?

I’ll have to dig even deeper; if COLORTERM is enough, I didn’t have to worry about custom terminfo file…

#7

https://openrepos.net/content/levone1/meego-terminal

1 Like
#8

same

Screenshot_20220208_001
Screenshot_20220208_0012160×1080 700 KB

and with Literm

Screenshot_20220208_002
Screenshot_20220208_0022160×1080 224 KB

#9

Interesting… Can you run viu image.png >image.txt in ToeTerm and attach the output file here?

#10

https://pastebin.com/z1Cu61cX

#11

Sorry - I just saw a new update, and works now…

Screenshot_20220208_003
Screenshot_20220208_0031080×2160 372 KB

Did you just update? I thought I updated yesterday …

#12

Nice, great that it works for you too! And thanks for testing!

Yeah, I released three versions close to each other; 1.9.10 is the current one. TBH there is also another way to address 24-bit colors on terminal, but with a quick glance, it doesn’t seem to be that popular, so I’ll release it along with the next release. I still need to give TERM some thought, but COLORTERM=truecolor seems quite certain at this point.

#13

Hello everyone!

ToeTerm 1.9.11 was released some time ago with COLORTERM=truecolor added as a new default environmental variable, which should complete truecolor support! Please let me know if it doesn’t get applied - the config section is a bit cumbersome to edit in code.

In other news, I packaged Fish shell for Sailfish OS! It’s a bit experimental still - especially the .spec file needs to be cleaned up - but it’s very much functional and seems to work just fine! It even runs fish_config as expected :exploding_head:!

It didn’t break my device, but as usual, install it on your own risk!

2 Likes
#14

Excuse my noobyness but if I type in terminal ‘toeterm --version’ it says no version known and then opens a terminal. :expressionless:

#15

Toeterm doesn’t seem to handle any command line arguments at the moment, but it should be able to at least report it’s version string with --version. Perhaps a tiny --help wouldn’t hurt either. Would you like to create an issue for this?

1 Like
#16

Consider it done. (Actually I just did it.)

2 Likes
#17

Okay, I was a tiny bit wrong; there is support to start into a shell of your choice, but there was no other command line support. If all goes well, there’ll be an update today :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#18

Things got, well, a little out of hand, but I just released 1.9.12-1 which now supports --help and --version among other under-the-hood improvements! It also has a safeguard for missing default shell, should someone else run into similar issue! More features are in development, stay tuned!

3 Likes
#19

Request - bigger keyboard / keys…

1 Like
#20

The keyboard height can be increased, but it already is as wide as it even can… I guess the font size can be increased a bit, but that’s not whay you were after, I assume. Eliminating the tiny borders between the keys could also help a tiny bit…

1 Like