The Jexer Homepage

Introduction

Welcome! Jexer is an open-source 100% Java Text User Interface (TUI) originally designed to outwardly resemble the DOS-era Turbo Vision library used by various Borland products. It is not an application itself, but rather an advanced text windowing system framework to help new applications take full advantage of the terminal. See the applications wishlist for some of the things Jexer can enable.

Jexer is hosted on GitLab.com and SourceForge.net.

Main Features

Jexer can sometimes resemble Turbo Vision on the outside, but its inside design is entirely new. Its main features are:

• Support for Xterm-like emulators including xterm, wezterm, foot, rxvt, xfce4-terminal, gnome-terminal, konsole, and more. With full mouse support including moving mouse cursor, and pixel-based mouse reporting. See the Wiki for how terminals tested against Jexer fare.
• Support for images in cells, with rendering to xterm via sixel or iTerm2 graphics. Images can be rotated and scaled. Jexer is (to my knowledge) the first text-based windowing system / terminal multiplexer capable of properly handling overlapping images mixed with text.
• Multihead display support, including images, to terminals with different resolutions and text cell aspect ratios.
• Support for CJK (fullwidth) and emoji characters, with user-providable fonts for CJK, emoji, and fallback.
• A Swing-based interface that reproduces the text-mode DOS VGA (including palette colors, e.g. brown is dark yellow) with the Terminus font.
• Common UI controls: check boxes, radio buttons, text fields, a color theme editor, treeview, file open/save dialog, message boxes, and many more.
• A full-featured Xterm terminal widget/window with a "vttest score" of 103 and support for: X10 mouse, 24-bit RGB colors, double-width / double-height, CJK / emoji, and sixel images. Jexer can be even be run inside itself. (Note that ptypipe is needed for terminal shells to be aware of window size changes.)
• A text editor widget/window with simple keyword highlighting.
• A data grid editor widget/window with row/column borders, save to text, and CSV import/export.
• System clipboard integration for cut/copy/paste.
• 100% Java. Jexer does not rely on any native libraries.

Maven

Jexer is available on Maven Central. See below:

    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.gitlab.klamonte</groupId>
      <artifactId>jexer</artifactId>
      <version>1.6.0</version>
    </dependency>
  

Jexer Project

SourceForge Jexer Project Page
GitLab Jexer Project Page
Latest README

Other Projects

Jexer users may find these projects useful:

• XtermDOOM. An effort to make MochaDoom run smoothly under Xterm. The game is not yet playable, but it can show off Jexer's multiplexing and multihead image capabilities. (For ramblings about the game, terminal resources, etc. see /r/xtermdoom.)
• Xterm Window Manager. A Jexer-based desktop environment / window manager for the console. Tiled and windowed terminal shells, virtual desktops, detachable and share-able sessions, and a plugin system for adding custom widgets, windows, screensavers, and other functions.
• LCXterm. LCXterm is a ncurses-based terminal emulator that brings additional conveniences to the raw Linux console and other terminal emulators. It can convert Linux console GPM to X10 mouse events, permitting use of Jexer from the raw Linux console.
  
• Tranquil Java IDE. A Jexer-based integrated development environment for Java.
  
• notcurses. Another TUI system, the most advanced in this space. Notcurses has unsurpassed support for images in a terminal and many other unique features.

The History Behind Jexer

The Evolution Of A Terminal Programmer -- a.k.a. how you too can do this if you want.

Terminal Snippets. How to do some things with ncurses.

Like Jexer, But Hate Java?

Check out the Porting Jexer page for:

• Location of key features to see how Jexer does it.
• A potential roadmap for porting Jexer to another language.
• Specific tricks if a language cannot call POSIX C functions such as termios and forkpty.
• An outline of Jexer's sixel (and other image formats) output strategy.

Sixel Tests

Terminal authors wishing to test their sixel support without the hassle of getting a Linux-based Java environment running can refer to session captures on this Sixel Tests page.