What is runvt?

RunVT is a small terminal emulator, meaning a program that displays text and colors the same way old-school computer terminals did, and lets you run other command-line programs inside it. It opens its own window on your screen and understands the VT100 and ANSI standards, which are the classic rules that determine how a terminal shows cursor movement, colors, and text formatting. The author originally built it as a companion for their own separate project, an emulator for old CP/M-based computers, but RunVT itself does not know anything about that specific program. It simply runs whatever command-line program you point it at and displays that program's output the way a terminal would. You could run a shell, a text editor, or the CP/M emulator inside it just the same. What sets RunVT apart from your everyday terminal window is that it is deliberately minimal and predictable. It has a fixed size decided when you launch it, no scrollback history, no tabs, and no settings files to configure. It shows a status bar at the bottom with basic info like the cursor position, and it supports things like colored text, line-drawing characters, an old graphics format called sixel for showing images, clipboard pasting, and typing accented characters correctly. To build it yourself, you need a C compiler and a graphics library called SDL2. Building produces a single program file with no separate installation step. There is also a way to build a Windows version by cross-compiling from Linux, and the README documents in detail a tricky compatibility issue the author ran into with how Windows handles terminal output differently from Linux. This project is aimed at developers and hobbyists working with retro computing emulators or command-line tools who want a simple, dependable terminal window without the complexity of a full-featured terminal application.