Co­braPy is in large part about rein­vent­ing wheel­s. We do, af­ter al­l, have per­fect­ly fine 80s-style de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ments in the mil­lions of 80s com­put­ers float­ing around, as well as em­u­la­tors, things like the Maximite and so on.

How­ev­er, I on­ly want to rein­vent fun wheel­s, so I am not do­ing a text ed­i­tor. And prob­a­bly gonna hack a ter­mi­nal-based RE­PL. And there's no way I am do­ing my own wifi con­fig tool (again) so, I should have a reg­u­lar, or­di­nary ter­mi­nal.

But the things I want that ter­mi­nal to do are ... un­usu­al, like raster graph­ic­s, and sprites. So ... why not do my own ter­mi­nal for this?

It's not the first ter­mi­nal I write! I wrote a dumb ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor around 1998 and I wrote a very ba­sic one us­ing python, pygame and pyte a few months ago. It's on video!

But this time I want­ed a bet­ter one, since I want this to look good. So I went and wrote one.

It us­es many 3rd par­ty things, be­cause life is short.

• Pyte for all the nit­ty grit­ty of ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tion
• raylib for all the graph­ics
• mon­oid is the font
• This page helped me with things like "what was the es­cape code for left­????"

And it looks this nice:

Yes, NICE, Stu­ar­t.

stop be­fore I claw my own eyes out

— Stu­art Lan­gridge (@sil) October 8, 2020