Terminal Features

The embedded terminal goes beyond basic text I/O. It supports full ANSI colors, accurate cursor positioning, dynamic resizing, and mouse-driven text selection with clipboard integration.

Full Color Support

Terminal output is rendered with complete ANSI color support via the ansi-to-tui crate. This translates ANSI escape sequences into styled TUI spans, meaning you see the same colors in AZUREAL’s terminal that you would see in a standalone terminal emulator:

• Standard 16 colors (bold/dim variants)
• 256-color palette
• 24-bit true color (RGB)
• Text attributes: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, inverse

Programs like git diff, ls --color, bat, delta, and other color-aware CLI tools render correctly without any special configuration beyond the TERM=xterm-256color environment variable that AZUREAL sets automatically.

Cursor Positioning

The terminal tracks cursor position using a vt100 parser that interprets cursor movement escape sequences in real time. This means programs that reposition the cursor – progress bars, interactive prompts, top-style dashboards – render accurately.

The cursor position is displayed as a blinking indicator in the terminal pane when in type mode, showing exactly where the next character will be inserted.

Dynamic Resizing

The terminal pane dynamically resizes to match its allocated dimensions in the layout. Resizing happens in two scenarios:

1. Manual resize – Pressing + or - in terminal command mode adjusts the pane height between 5 and 40 lines.
2. Layout reflow – When the overall terminal window is resized, the terminal pane adjusts its width (and potentially height) to fit the new layout dimensions.

On each resize, the PTY is notified of the new dimensions so that programs running inside it can reflow their output correctly. This means full-screen programs like vim, htop, or less adapt to the available space.

Text Selection

Text selection in the terminal uses mouse drag with automatic scrolling:

1. Click and drag to start a selection. The selected text is highlighted.
2. Drag past the top or bottom edge of the pane to auto-scroll through the terminal history while extending the selection.
3. Release to finalize the selection.

Selections are tracked in scrollback-adjusted absolute coordinates. This means that if you scroll up into history, select text, and then the terminal scrolls further, the selection remains anchored to the correct text.

Clipboard Copy

With an active selection:

• macOS: Cmd+C copies the selected text to the system clipboard.
• Linux / Windows: Ctrl+C copies the selected text to the system clipboard.

Without an active selection, the same key combination sends the standard interrupt signal (SIGINT) to the PTY, which is the expected behavior for canceling a running command.

Scrollback History

The terminal maintains a scrollback buffer that you can navigate with the mouse wheel. Scrolling up moves through command history and output; scrolling down returns toward the current output. The scrollback buffer preserves all output from the shell session.

Quick Reference