Reference
Terminal coverage
A feature-by-feature map of Sinclair's terminal support, as of phases 1–12. The VT core is built and tested in isolation (the vt crate), free of any I/O or GUI types; this page tracks what that core and the surrounding layers support, plus the known gaps that remain.
Status key: ✓ implemented, ◑ partial (works for the common case, with documented limits), ✗ not yet.
Terminal emulation (VT)
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| C0/C1 controls, ESC dispatch | ✓ | BEL/BS/HT/LF/VT/FF/CR/SO/SI, ESC 7/8/D/E/H/M/c/=/>, SCS, DECALN |
| CSI cursor/erase/scroll/insert | ✓ | CUU…CUP, ED/EL/ECH, IL/DL/ICH/DCH, SU/SD, REP, DECSTBM |
| SGR (colors + attributes) | ✓ | 16/256/truecolor (semicolon + colon forms), underline styles, all attrs |
| Modes (DEC private + ANSI) | ✓ | DECAWM/DECTCEM/DECOM/IRM, 47/1047/1048/1049, bracketed paste |
| Charsets (G0/G1, DEC special) | ✓ | line-drawing via SCS + SO/SI |
| Scrollback + alt screen | ✓ | ring buffer, content-anchored offset, no scrollback on alt |
| Wide characters | ✓ | width 2 + spacer cells |
| Combining characters | ◑ | one inline combining mark per cell (covers diacritics; stacked marks beyond the first are dropped) |
| Reflow on resize | ✓ | rejoins wrapped lines and re-wraps at the new width, cursor follows, overflow → scrollback |
| Damage tracking | ✓ | per-row + full-escalation (renderer does not yet clip to it) |
Input
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Legacy key encoding | ✓ | modifiers, cursor/tilde/function keys, app cursor/keypad |
| Mouse reporting | ✓ | X10/normal/button/any + SGR (1000/1002/1003/1006), alt-scroll |
| Bracketed paste | ✓ | |
| Kitty keyboard protocol | ✓ | all five enhancement flags encoded, over the full functional-key table: negotiation (CSI ? / > / < / = u, 16-deep per-screen stack), disambiguation, press/repeat/release event types, alternate (shifted) keys, associated text, and all-keys-as-escape-codes — including the bare modifier keys, synthesised from the window layer's modifier-state changes. The modifier parameter carries super, hyper, meta and the locks; keys with no legacy spelling (F13–F35, keypad, media, lock and menu keys) use their 57344+ codes. Reported modifiers are the ones the window layer delivers — gpui exposes shift/alt/ctrl/super and caps lock, not hyper, meta, or num lock |
OSC / clipboard / links
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Title (OSC 0/2) + title stack | ✓ | |
| Palette OSC 4 / 104, cursor OSC 12 / 112 | ✓ | |
Dynamic color queries (OSC 4/10/11/12 ?) | ✓ | answered from theme via set_report_colors |
| OSC 7 cwd reporting | ✓ | inherited by new splits, tabs, and windows; defaults to $HOME when unknown |
| OSC 52 clipboard | ✓ | base64 decode → system clipboard |
| Desktop notifications (OSC 9 / 777 / 99) | ✓ | native banner + per-tab attention indicator; cleared on focus |
| OSC 8 hyperlinks | ✓ | interned per-cell, underlined, open-modifier click opens |
| URL detection (no OSC 8) | ✓ | open-modifier click opens detected URLs |
| Path detection | ✓ | an open-modifier click opens a filesystem path with the desktop's default handler, and hovering underlines it — but only once the candidate resolves against the pane's cwd, so text that merely looks like a path stays inert. Right-click still reveals it in the file manager. The modifier is cmd on macOS, ctrl elsewhere |
| Focus reporting (?1004) | ✓ | |
| Synchronized output (?2026) | ✓ | frame-gated with a 150 ms stuck-sync timeout |
| XTGETTCAP, DA1/DA2, DSR | ✓ |
Shell integration
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Semantic prompts (OSC 133) | ✓ | A marks prompt rows (into scrollback) |
| Jump-to-prompt | ✓ | jump_to_prompt:N, default cmd+up/down |
| Auto-injected shell scripts | ✓ | shell-integration injects OSC 133/7 hooks via env (zsh ZDOTDIR, fish vendor_conf.d, bash PROMPT_COMMAND); no rc edits |
| sudo / title helpers | ✗ | part of the shell scripts above |
Fonts & rendering
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Font family + size | ✓ | live-reloadable |
| Fallback chain | ✓ | repeated font-family |
| Emoji | ✓ | via fallback chain + system fallback |
| Ligatures | ✓ | run shaping + calt |
| Font features | ✓ | +liga/-calt/ss01/cv01=2 |
| Box-drawing / blocks | ◑ | light lines/junctions, blocks, shades, eighths drawn custom; heavy/double/dashed/rounded fall back to font |
| Cursor styles (DECSCUSR) | ✓ | block/bar/underline, config default |
| Images (sixel) | ✓ | sixel decoded (RGB/HLS palette, RLE, raster attrs) and GPU-composited, anchored to the grid so it scrolls with text |
| Images (kitty graphics) | ✓ | a byte-level APC pre-parser (term/apc.rs) captures ESC _G … ST — which vte still discards — and term/gfx.rs dispatches all eight actions: transmit, transmit-and-display, display, delete, query, frame, animate, compose. Every medium (t=d/f/t/s, with O=/S= windows), every format (RGB/RGBA/PNG, zlib, chunked), image ids and image numbers, the full delete-specifier table, source cropping, cell-box scaling, cell offsets, z-index (including below the cell background), placement ids, virtual placements with unicode placeholders, and animation — frames, gaps, composition modes, loops, playback state |
UI / workspace
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tabs | ✓ | bar, activate, close, move, goto N |
| Splits | ✓ | binary tree, directional focus, divider drag |
| Selection (cell/word/line) | ✓ | copy, copy-on-select, bracketed paste |
| Scrollback view + indicator | ✓ | |
| Search in scrollback | ✓ | cmd+f overlay with editable query (caret, cursor keys), live highlight, n/N nav |
| Global search across tabs | ✓ | cmd+alt+f fuzzy picker over recent output from every tab |
| Hint mode (keyboard link-follow) | ✓ | cmd+shift+u labels visible URLs; type a label to open |
| Copy / vi mode | ✓ | cmd+shift+space keyboard selection: hjkl/arrows, w/b, 0/$, g/G, v select, y yank |
| Smart selection | ✓ | double-click a URL/email/path/git-hash (else a word) |
| Command blocks (OSC 133) | ✓ | cmd+shift+o copies the last command's output |
| Clipboard history | ✓ | cmd+shift+y picker over recent copies |
| Snippets / profiles / emoji pickers | ✓ | cmd+alt+s / cmd+alt+p / cmd+alt+e; snippets insert, profiles open a tab, emoji insert |
| Secret redaction | ✓ | redact regexes mask matches on every copy path |
| Regex output triggers | ✓ | trigger = regex | title notifies on matching output |
| Line timestamps + annotations | ✓ | timestamps gutter; cmd+alt+a pins a note to a line |
| Pane badges | ✓ | badge watermark with {cwd}/{host} |
| Activity dashboard | ✓ | sidebar: each tab's working/attention/idle state at a glance |
| Auto light/dark, opacity, bg image | ✓ | theme-light/theme-dark, background-opacity, background-image, minimum-contrast |
Config (settings.json, JSON with comments) | ✓ | full option set, diagnostics |
| Live config reload | ✓ | theme/font/padding/cursor/keybinds |
| Settings panel (GUI) | ✓ | cmd+, modal: click controls (theme/font size+style/cursor/padding/scrollback/copy-on-select) plus editable text fields (font family, shell, foreground, background) via a built-in text-input widget; all written back to the config file |
| Text-input widget | ✓ | textedit model (insert/delete/cursor, unicode) + in-panel field with caret; also backs the search query |
Keybindings (trigger = action) | ✓ | config-driven, defaults + user overrides + unbind |
| Command palette | ✓ | cmd+shift+p fuzzy launcher over the action catalog, shows keybinds |
| Broadcast input | ✓ | cmd+shift+b mirrors typed keys to every pane in the tab (floating indicator) |
| Session restore | ✓ | session-restore saves tabs/splits/cwds on quit, rebuilds on launch |
| Session recording | ✓ | record a pane to an asciinema v2 .cast (cmd+shift+r); plays with asciinema play, embeddable |
| Recording export | ✓ | render a .cast to GIF or MP4/MOV/WebM via Export Recording or sinclair export; optional gpui-fidelity renderer on macOS |
| Per-tab context | ✓ | each tab shows the focused pane's git branch + working directory |
| Agent attention | ✓ | OSC 9/777/99 (or sinclair notify) post a native banner and light up the tab |
| Scripting API (MCP + socket) | ✓ | sinclair mcp exposes run_command, send_input, read_screen, new_tab, split, list_tabs/panes, focus_tab, notify |
| Themes | ✓ | 22 builtin schemes + overrides |
| Native macOS menu bar | ✓ | Sinclair/File/Edit/View/Workspace/Window menus (plus AI when enabled), items reuse config actions (shortcuts shown); includes an About panel (icon, version, release date) |
| Custom window titlebar | ✓ | transparent native bar; app-drawn strip with tabs folded in and drag-to-move. macOS keeps the traffic lights; Linux draws its own minimize/maximize/close + resize edges (client-side decorations) |
| macOS status-bar (tray) item | ✗ | NSStatusBar is not exposed by the UI layer; needs custom native code |
Prioritized remaining gaps
- Stacked combining marks — only the first combining mark per cell is kept; full grapheme clusters / ZWJ emoji need spillover storage. (Kitty placeholder cells are unaffected: their marks are decoded to coordinates on write and packed into the same slot.)
- Damage-clipped rendering — shape only dirty rows for big-throughput wins.
- Heavy/double/dashed/rounded box-drawing — extend
boxdrawgeometry. - macOS status-bar (tray) item — needs native NSStatusBar code.