solid-xterm v0.1.3

solid-xterm

A simple reactive SolidJS component wrapper for Xterm.js.

Installation

npm i solid-xterm

Usage

To get started, you can render a terminal using the <XTerm /> component. This will create a terminal with default styling and automatically attach it to the DOM.

import { XTerm } from 'solid-xterm';

const MyTerminal = () => {
  return <XTerm />;
};

On its own, the XTerm component will not directly process user input (and will do pretty much nothing if you display it like this). Instead, you are expected to pass input to a backing pseudo-terminal (pty) using the onData callback. This callback will be called with the user input as a string. Note that even non printable characters such as arrow keys will be passed to this callback as ANSI escape sequences - your pty should know what to do with these and should provide a response that XTerm can understand.

const MyTerminal = () => {
  return (
    <XTerm
      onData={(data) => {
        // Your logic to pass data to backing pty
      }}
    />
  );
};

Once your pty provides output, you can display it in the terminal by passing it to the terminal.write() method. This method will be available on the terminal instance provided in the onData callback.

const MyTerminal = () => {
  return (
    <XTerm
      onData={async (data, terminal) => {
        const response = await sendToPty(data);
        terminal().write(response);
      }}
    />
  );
};

To gain access to the terminal instance when it is created, you can use the onMount prop. This will be invoked when the terminal is first mounted to the DOM. Optionally your callback can return a cleanup function that will be invoked when the terminal unmounts.

You should use the onMount function to subscribe to events related to your backing pty and invoke functions on the terminal in response.

import { XTerm, Terminal } from 'xterm';

const MyTerminal = () => {
  const handleMount = (terminal: Terminal) => {
    terminal().write('Hello World!');
    return () => {
      console.log('Terminal unmounted.');
    };
  };

  return <XTerm onMount={handleMount} />;
};

The examples above demonstrate the use of onData and onMount, but there are many other event properties on the xterm.js Terminal object that are implemented in this wrapper. Below is a list of all the events to which you can add listener callbacks, and the provided arguments to those callbacks. Note that, to maintain reactivity patterns in SolidJS, every callback is provided a reference to the current terminal in addition to the default arguments provided by the xterm.js library.

Please reference the xterm.js docs for additional information on these events.

Options

The XTerm component accepts all the same options as the xterm.js Terminal constructor. These options can be passed as props to the component.

const MyTerminal = () => {

  return (
    <XTerm
      options={{
        cursorBlink: true,
        fontFamily: 'Roboto Mono',
        lineHeight: 1.2,
        ...
      }}
    />
  );
};

If you would like to customize the colors of the terminal, you can use the theme property on the options object. This property accepts a partial ITheme type, and any properties not provided will be filled in with the default values. For more information on the ITheme type, see the xterm.js docs.

const MyTerminal = () => {
  return (
    <XTerm
      options={{
        theme: {
          background: '#101010',
          foreground: '#fdfdfd',
        },
      }}
    />
  );
};

XTerm Addons

XTerm.js has a number of addons that can be used to extend the functionality of the terminal. There are officially supported addons as well as community-developed addons available.

To use an addon, you must first import the addon class and then either pass it as-is, or instantiate it first before passing it to the XTerm component in an array.

import { FitAddon } from '@xterm/addon-fit';
import { SearchAddon } from '@xterm/addon-search';

const MyTerminal = () => {
  const searchAddon = createMemo(() => new SearchAddon());

  // This is just an example function demonstrating a use case where some addons may need
  // to be accessed after passing to the XTerm component. Memoization is recommended for this.
  const handleSearch = (search: string) => {
    searchAddon().findNext(search);
  };

  // You can pass either an ITerminalAddon constructor or an instance, depending on whether you need to access it later.
  return <XTerm addons={[FitAddon, searchAddon()]} />;
};

Contributing

I'm new to SolidJS and its reactivity patterns. You may have some better ideas regarding how this component is designed. If you're interested in contributing, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.