ImGui Terminal Emulator

An ImGui-native terminal emulator based on suckless st. Replaces st's X11/Xft frontend (x.c) with an ImGui-based adapter that runs renderer agnostic — GLFW+OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, or any other ImGui backend.

Cross-renderer portability. st is tied to X11. wherever ImGui runs this terminal runs.
Composable as a widget. The terminal is exposed as Terminal::init / Terminal::draw_widget / Terminal::shutdown. For direct control, Terminal::draw_canvas renders into the current ImGui window.

Build

CMake 3.21+ and a C++20 compiler (gcc 10+, clang 10+, Apple clang 12+ / Xcode 12+, MSVC 19.29+ / VS 2019 16.10+). Requires fontconfig and freetype.

Windows (MSVC)

Visual Studio 2019+. Clone vcpkg into the repo once and bootstrap it; CMake auto-detects it from ./vcpkg/:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
.\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
cmake -B build -S .
cmake --build build --config Release
.\build\imgui_terminal.exe

Windows (MinGW / MSYS2)

From a MinGW64 shell (mintty):

pacman -S make cmake mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain \
          mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw mingw-w64-x86_64-freetype \
          mingw-w64-x86_64-fontconfig mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config
cmake -B build -S .
cmake --build build
./build/imgui_terminal

Linux / macOS

Install deps via your package manager (apt, brew, etc.), then:

cmake -B build -S .
cmake --build build
./build/imgui_terminal

On macOS, launch with open ./build/imgui_terminal direct exec from terminal can't grab keyboard focus on macOS 26 + GLFW 3.4.

Alternative renderers / native clients

cmake --build build --target imgui_terminal_metal   # macOS only
cmake --build build --target imgui_terminal_vulkan  # needs Vulkan SDK
cmake --build build --target p_osx                  # native macOS Cocoa+Metal

What works

• Terminal emulation — bash, zsh, fish, vim, tmux, htop, less, and more. and more...
• Keyboard: input dispatch shortcuts, kmap, chords
• Mouse: drag-select, double/triple-click word/line snap, wheel, custom bindings, plus mouse reporting (X10/VT200/SGR) — vim/tmux/htop mouse modes work!
• Fonts: 4 variants (regular/bold/italic/bold-italic) via fontconfig discovery, plus CJK and color emoji fallback (Hiragino/Noto + Apple/Noto Color Emoji)
• Colors: 256-color palette, truecolor, X11 rgb.txt color names, runtime palette mutation via OSC sequences
• HiDPI: density-aware rasterization on Retina displays
• Focus events: \033[I / \033[O reporting for tmux focus-events, vim autoread, etc.
• Selection + clipboard: drag-to-select, OS clipboard via ImGui's API, bracketed paste

The idea - ImGui plays the role of X11

The widget and emulator is implemented in the terminal class and deliberately uses ImGui APIs only — no GLFW, OpenGL, or Vulkan.

#include "terminal.h"      // link terminal.cpp

Terminal t;
t.init(80, 24, nullptr);   // spawn the system shell
// once per ImGui frame:
t.draw_widget("###term");
// on teardown:
t.shutdown();

Demo

demo_sharp.mp4

Windows

License

• This code (root, including terminal.h, terminal.cpp, CMakeLists.txt, build config, etc.) — see LICENSE (BSL 1.1), me (at) nealmick (dot) com for licensing
• Upstream st (st/) — see st/LICENSE (MIT)
• ImGui (imgui/) — see imgui/LICENSE.txt (MIT)