Contour - a modern & actually fast Terminal Emulator

contour is a modern and actually fast, modal, virtual terminal emulator, for everyday use. It is aiming for power users with a modern feature mindset.

Features

• ✅ Available on all major platforms, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows.
• ✅ GPU-accelerated rendering.
• ✅ Font ligatures support (such as in Fira Code).
• ✅ Unicode: Emoji support (-: 🌈 💝 😛 👪 - including ZWJ, VS15, VS16 emoji :-)
• ✅ Unicode: Grapheme cluster support
• ✅ Terminal tabs
• ✅ Persistent sessions that survive the window (daemon mode) — reattach locally or over the network, and interoperate with tmux in both directions
• ✅ Bold and italic fonts
• ✅ High-DPI support.
• ✅ Vertical Line Markers (quickly jump to markers in your history!)
• ✅ Vi-like input modes for improved selection and copy'n'paste experience and Vi-like scrolloff feature.
• ✅ Blurred behind transparent background support for Windows 10 and above as well as the KDE and GNOME desktop environment on Linux.
• ✅ Blurrable Background image support.
• ✅ Runtime configuration reload
• ✅ 256-color and Truecolor support
• ✅ Key binding customization
• ✅ Color Schemes
• ✅ Profiles (grouped customization of: color scheme, login shell, and related behaviors)
• ✅ Synchronized rendering (via SM ? 2026 / RM ? 2026)
• ✅ Text reflow (configurable via SM ? 2028 / RM ? 2028)
• ✅ Clickable hyperlinks via OSC 8
• ✅ Clipboard setting via OSC 52
• ✅ Sixel inline images
• ✅ ReGIS vector graphics (VT330/VT340)
• ✅ Terminal page buffer capture VT extension to quickly extract contents.
• ✅ Builtin Fira Code inspired progress bar support.
• ✅ Read-only mode, protecting against accidental user-input to the running application, such as Ctrl+C.
• ✅ VT320 Host-programmable and Indicator status line support.
• ✅ and much more ...

Installation

contour is packaged and available for installation on multiple distributions:

• Fedora use official package
• Arch use official package
• Void use official package
• openSUSE use official package

Additional packages can be found on the release page including:

• ubuntu package
• AppImage
• static build
• MacOS bundle
• Windows installer and zipped app

Installing via Flatpak

Install from Flathub

Click the following button to install Contour from the Flathub store.

Prerequisites

• Make sure you have flatpak installed in your system (here is a tutorial on how to install it), and make sure that the version is >= 0.10 (check it using this command: flatpak --version)
• Add the flathub repository using the following command: flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo.
• Proceed with one of the following options:
  • Install from Flathub
  • Install from GitHub release

Requirements

• operating system: A recent operating system (macOS, Windows 10+, an up-to-date Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD)
• GPU: driver must support at least OpenGL 3.3 hardware accelerated or as software rasterizer.
• CPU: x86-64 AMD or Intel with AES-NI instruction set or ARMv8 with crypto extensions.

Configuration

In order to configure Contour, it is necessary to modify the configuration file contour.yml, which is initially generated in the $HOME/.config/contour directory. Some features also require shell integration. These can be generated via the CLI (see below), these currently exist for zsh, fish and tcsh.

Persistent sessions (daemon mode)

Experimental. Daemon mode is new in 0.7.0 and still settling. It is built into every Contour and covered by the test suite, but its command-line flags and its wire protocol may change between releases.

Contour already gives you tabs and split panes inside one window. Daemon mode goes further: it moves your sessions into a background process, so they survive the window that shows them. A long build keeps going after you close the window, work done over SSH survives the link dropping, and the same sessions can be reattached from another machine over an encrypted connection.

contour client   # attaches to the daemon, starting one if none is running

Contour also speaks tmux's control-mode protocol in both directions: tmux-aware tooling — and the stock tmux binary itself — can attach to a Contour daemon, and contour client --tmux mirrors a running tmux server into a Contour window, windows as tabs and panes as splits.

See Persistent sessions for the full guide.

Installing from source

Contour is best installed from supported package managers, but you can build from source by following the instructions below.

UNIX-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS)

Prerequisites

./scripts/install-deps.sh

This script might ask you for the administrator password if a package dependency can be installed via the system package manager.

Compile

You can use cmake presets to compile contour. The full list of available presets can be seen using cmake --list-presets. To compile release build for linux clang-release or gcc-release, or appleclang-release on macOS accordingly.

cmake --preset clang-release
cmake --build --preset clang-release

# Optionally, if you want to install from source
cmake --build --preset clang-release --target install

Windows 10 or newer

Prerequisites

For Windows, you must have Windows 10, 2018 Fall Creators Update, and Visual Studio 2019, installed. It will neither build nor run on any prior Windows OS, due to libterminal making use of ConPTY API.

Using External ConPTY Support on Windows 10

On Windows 10, the built-in ConPTY implementation has limitations with mouse input handling, particularly when using WSL2 with terminal applications like tmux. This is a known issue that affects several terminal emulators.

Contour supports using an external conpty.dll implementation which resolves these issues on Windows 10.

To enable external ConPTY:

1. Get conpty.dll and OpenConsole.exe files from wezterm: Go to https://github.com/wez/wezterm/tree/main/assets/windows/conhost and download conpty.dll and OpenConsole.exe

2. Put these files into your Contour bin directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Contour Terminal Emulator 0.6\bin)

3. Start Contour. It will automatically detect and use the external ConPTY implementation.

4. Set up vcpkg, preferably somewhere high up in the folder hierarchy, and add the folder to your PATH.

cd C:\
git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
.\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

2. Install Visual Studio Build Tools (make sure to select the CLI tools for C++, which you might need to do in the separate components tab).
3. Install Qt6 (i.e. to C:\Qt)
4. Open the developer version of Powershell.
5. In the contour source folder execute .\scripts\install-deps.ps1. This step may take a very long time.

Compile

In the developer version of Powershell:

# change paths accordingly if you installed QT and vcpkg to somewhere else
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=C:\vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:\Qt\6.5.0\msvc2019_64\lib\cmake
cmake --build build/

# Optionally, if you want to install from source
cmake --build build/ --target install

Distribution Packages

CLI - Command Line Interface

  Usage:

    contour [terminal] [config FILE] [profile NAME] [debug TAGS] [live-config] [dump-state-at-exit PATH]
                       [early-exit-threshold UINT] [working-directory DIRECTORY] [class WM_CLASS]
                       [platform PLATFORM[:OPTIONS]] [session SESSION_ID] [PROGRAM ARGS...]
    contour font-locator [config FILE] [profile NAME] [debug TAGS]
    contour info vt
    contour help
    contour version
    contour license
    contour parser-table
    contour list-debug-tags
    contour daemon [socket PATH] [label NAME] [exit-with-last-session] [tmux-compat-socket LABEL]
                   [listen-tcp HOST:PORT] [token TOKEN] [token-file FILE]
                   [tls-cert FILE] [tls-key FILE] [log TAGS] [log-file FILE]
    contour client [socket PATH] [label NAME] [tmux] [tmux-socket PATH] [profile NAME] [config FILE]
                   [connect-tcp HOST:PORT] [token TOKEN] [token-file FILE] [tls-ca FILE]
                   [log TAGS] [log-file FILE]
    contour generate terminfo to FILE
    contour generate config to FILE
    contour generate integration shell SHELL to FILE
    contour capture [logical] [words] [timeout SECONDS] [lines COUNT] to FILE
    contour set profile [to NAME]

References

• VT510: VT510 Manual, see Chapter 5.
• ECMA-35: Character Code Structure and Extension Techniques
• ECMA-43: 8-bit Coded Character Set Structure and Rules
• ECMA-48: Control Functions for Coded Character Sets
• ISO/IEC 8613-6: Character content architectures
• xterm: xterm control sequences
• console_codes Linux console codes
• Summary of ANSI standards for ASCII terminals
• Text Terminal HOWTO (Chapter 7.2, PTY)
• ANSI escape code in Wikipedia

License

Contour - A modern C++ Terminal Emulator
-------------------------------------------

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.