ctx is a 2D vector graphics platform/protocol/library/terminal. With modular components that can be used to user interfaces ranging from microcontrollers to desktops.

Features and references

HTML5 Canvas 2D Context
Easily bindable C API and protocol builds directly on this standard. Compositing and blending is according to Compositing and Blending Level 2; ctx goes further than the standard and permits all blending modes to be combined with all compositing modes.
Small footprint
Can be tuned for microcontrollers down to ~7kb of RAM + 30kb of code + 12kb of fontdata, combined with immediate mode UI that can be re-run, it is sufficient to have a framebuffer covering one or a few scanlines. More RAM permits more flexible arrangement of more components using the CTX protocol.
Portable
C99 code, with simple make basd build system and only optional dependencies. It is not a research prototype relying on vendor specific GPU drivers/frameworks. Within the architecture of ctx; baking of datastructures for GPU rendering can be incorporated.
RGB and CMYK, 8pc and 32bit floating point
Supporting RGB332, RGB565 and grayscale + 1bit mode. With ICC based management of RGB user/device spaces through babl.

Efficient serializations
ctx is built around a binary - and - textual serialization/drawlist of a 2D context. Thes drawlist representations are used for larger than RAM framebuffers on microcontrollers, multi threaded cached rendering through SDL2 and /dev/fb0 backends and network transparent rendering inside ctx terminal. When used for graphical clients inside terminals; ctx is even applying inter-frame compression; reusing frames from the preceding drawlist by reference. .
text rendering
UTF8 native, there is two font backends driven by stb_trutetype reading glyph paths on demand from a TTF/OTF file loaded in RAM/ROM and a native ctx drawlist representation, separated by '@' define-glyph commands, the latter provides minimal overhead on micro controllers in realtime translation of glyph outlines to framebuffer contents. Shaping is currently limited to horizontal advances + horizontal kerning, no ligatures.
VT4xx, ECMA-48
Almost full vt100 and vt220 escape sequence handling, scrollback, dterm window manipulation (among tabs/clients), bracketed paste, 256 and 24bit colors are supported - as well as a growing subset of vt400 and other relevant terminal escape sequences.
ametameric palette
The terminal 16 color palette is optimized for legibility for both trichromats and dichromats
sixels
DEC terminal family standard for raster graphics transfer
kitty graphics
kitty style raster graphics transfer
iterm2 inline images
iterm2 style raster grarphics transfer
/dev/fb0
Both ctx as a terminal/platform and applications built with the ctx library can run directly on the linux framebuffer without X/wayland, for it to be fast a fast framebuffer is needed.
atty
audio recording and playback (only raw pcm for now, opus codec NYI)
stb_truetype.h
If the declarations for stb_truetype are included before ctx.h - functions to load fonts from TTF/OTF files become available.
SDL2
Optional backend that works better than the framebuffer that gets included when SDL.h is included before ctx.h
cairo
support code to render to cairo contexts if cairo.h is included before ctx.h, useful for conformance verfication and SVG and PDF output.

git

Development of ctx happens in a mono-repo, which contains a split up source-tree for the rasterizer/protocol that ends up in the single-header ctx.h files, a tool to generate ctx format subsetted fonts from TTF/OTF files, the sources for a client/terminal multi-plexer - as well as demo applications for the platform. 

$ git clone https://ctx.graphics/.git
$ cd ctx.graphics
$ make

Downloads

There is no tarball releases yet, but the development version can be cloned and contains some example/test clients in C and bash, if you've got the development headers for SDL2 the following builds a ctx binary.

ctx.h760KThe singleheader library ctx.
ctx-font-regular.h128KExample font to use with ctx, to be a true single header solution - the ascii subset of this is included by default.
ctx-x86_64-static64bit static linux binary - should work in mant distros, but has only DRM, /dev/fb0 and braille rendering not SDL2
ctx-i486-static32bit static linux binary - should work in mant distros, but has only DRM, /dev/fb0 and braille rendering not SDL2

license and funding

The terminal is available under GPLv3+, and ctx.h is available under LGPLv3+ you can encourage continued development of ctx and dissimilar technologies by financially supporting me, Øyvind Kolås who is doing independent pro-bono R&D through patreon and similar. If my income through such sources is above 4000USD per month for a year, or a similar amount in shorter time I want to relicense the rasterizer and protocol parts of ctx under the ISC license.

bugs

The current status of ctx is beyond proof of concept - but still does not fully realize a minimal system demonstrating it's capabilities - some features are also broken and need repair - and for third party use probably more urgently than the following wishlist. When this list is nearing 0 it is time for a tarball release of ctx - event if the single header ctx.h already is the rolling release.

some potential improvements