README.2010

FCTerm is a terminal emulator, written a long time ago (circa 1991)
to act as a color terminal emulator, back in the days where a 50MHz Sparc
CPU or a 50MHz 386 was state of the art, and the only xterm available
didnt understand color.

It has been my only terminal emulator in all this time. Originally an
experiment in learning X11 programming - it evolved into code which
drives the CRiSP editor. (CRiSP took an alternate evolution 
which involved writing its own widget toolkit and being ported to
other platforms, including Windows and MacOSX).

As the years have gone by, fcterm has been enhanced to include the 
following facilities:

- blinking
- infinite scrollback
- multiple terminal support
- map view of screens
- resistance to server restart (i.e. you wont lose sessions if X server needs
  to restart)
- speed - beating all competitors
- support for pty detaching/attaching
- highlighted search support (highlight all strings which match a pattern)

Most recently, fcterm was extended to include support for vector type
drawing, similar to the tektronix emulation found in other terminal
emulators. FCTerm doesnt support tektronix, because the tektronix mode is
very outdated (e.g. no color support).

What FCTerm supports is Xlib like drawing via escape sequences. This
means you can do some very interesting and impressive things.

One thing that interested me, after seeing so many panel widgets in systems
like GNOME and KDE and iStat (tool for MacOSX), was looking at all
the statistics available on a Linux system. You never know which stats
will tell a story, and fcterm was modified to support graph drawing,
along with a suite of perl tools and modules to collect and display the
stats.

A simple perl tool collects the statistics, and another draws the collected
data, in zoomable graphs.

Some screen shots of these graphs are available below.

(FCTerm is the name of the terminal emulator, but underlying fcterm
is the CTW (color terminal widget) which implements the semantics
of a terminal emulator)

Tools
-----

FCTerm comes with a variety of tools to demonstrate the graphics
mode.

samples/collect.pl
	This can be used to collect samples of data from
	the /proc filesystem - cpu, memory, vm, disk, etc.
	This is stored in a CSV file.

samples/display.pl
	Tool to display the graphs collected by collect.pl.
	A menu bar is shown at the left, and you can click on the menu
	entries to show different subsets of graphs (which update in
	real time).

	Click on a mini graph to zoom it to full window size.

	display.pl understands the terminal being resized and adjusts
	appropriately.

	All of this is done by escape sequences.

Getting Help
------------

You can see what escape sequences are supported from the
inbuilt command line. Type <Ctrl-Shift-F10> and type the command 'esc'.