foot

foot is a fast Wayland terminal emulator.

Index

1. Features
2. Non-features
3. What does not work?
4. Fonts
5. Shortcuts
   1. Keyboard
   2. Mouse
6. Requirements
   1. Running
   2. Building
7. Installing
   1. Arch Linux
   2. Other

Features

• Fast (TODO insert benchmark results here)
• Wayland native
• DE agnostic
• User configurable font fallback
• Scrollback search
• Color emoji support
• "Server" mode (one master process, many windows)

Non-features

This is a non-exhaustive list of things some people might consider being important features (i.e. "must-haves"), that are unlikely to ever be supported by foot.

• Tabs
• Graphical elements (menu, buttons etc)

What does not work?

This is a list of known, but probably not all, issues:

• Unicode combining characters

  Examples: á, 👪🏼 (may not be displayed correctly in your browser/editor)

• Reflow text on window resize

• GNOME; might work, but without window decorations.

  Strictly speaking, foot is at fault here; all Wayland applications must be able to draw their own window decorations (but foot is not).

  However, most people want a uniform look and feel on their desktop, including the window decorations. For this reason, a Wayland application can request Server Side Decorations (SSD). GNOME will reply with a "I here you, but sorry, I wont do that".

Fonts

foot supports all fonts that can be loaded by freetype, including bitmap fonts and color emoji fonts.

Foot uses fontconfig to locate and configure the font(s) to use. Since fontconfig's fallback mechanism is imperfect, especially for monospace fonts (it doesn't prefer monospace fonts even though the requested font is one), foot allows you, the user, to configure the fallback fonts to use.

This also means you can configure each fallback font individually; you want that fallback font to use this size, and you want that other fallback font to be italic? No problem!

If a glyph cannot be found in any of the user configured fallback fonts, then fontconfig's list is used.

Shortcuts

At the moment, all shortcuts are hard coded and cannot be changed. It is not possible to define new key bindings.

Keyboard

• shift+page up/page down

  Scroll up/down in history

• ctrl+shift+c

  Copy selected text to the clipboard

• ctrl+shift+v

  Paste from clipboard

• ctrl+shift+r

  Start a scrollback search

While doing a scrollback search, the following shortcuts are available:

• ctrl+r

  Search backward for next match

• ctrl+s

  Search forward for next match

• escape, ctrl+g

  Cancel the search

• return

  Finish the search and copy the current match to the primary selection

Mouse

• left - single-click

  Drag to select; when released, the selected text is copied to the primary selection. Note that this feature is normally disabled whenever the client has enabled mouse tracking, but can be forced by holding shift.

• left - double-click

  Selects the word (separated by spaces, period, comma, parenthesis etc) under the pointer. Hold ctrl to select everything under the pointer up to, and until, the next space characters.

• left - triple-click

  Selects the entire row

• middle

  Paste from primary selection

• wheel

  Scroll up/down in history

Requirements

Running

• fontconfig
• freetype
• pixman
• wayland (client and cursor libraries)
• xkbcommon

Building

In addition to the dev variant of the packages above, you need:

• meson
• ninja
• wayland protocols
• ncurses
• scdoc

Installing

Arch Linux

Use makepkg to build the bundled PKGBUILD (run makepkg in the source root directory).

Note that it will do a profiling-guided build, and that this requires a running wayland session since it needs to run an intermediate build of foot.

Other

Foot uses meson. If you are unfamiliar with it, the official tutorial might be a good starting point.

I also recommend taking a look at the bundled Arch PKGBUILD file, to see how it builds foot.