ctx is an audio-capable 2D vector graphics terminal. A protocol serializing HTML5 canvas 2D context as SVG path data. And a minimal application development platform, the terminal itself is written in ctx and can be self-hosted.

The self-contained static builds are sufficient to run minimalistic desktop+shells only sessions with very low RAM requirements.

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.
backends: ctx, DRM, fbdev, SDL2, braille
ctx comes with 5 main backends, the ctx backend renders the ctx protocol to stdout, and reads input - it is meant to be used from the ctx terminal. DRM and fbdev are available without any dependencies in the static builds, this backend - like the braille backend, take keyboard input from stdin; mouse events are read from /dev/input/mice. The SDL2 backend permits using ctx clients under wayland/X11.
RGB and CMYK, 8pc and 32bit floating point
Supporting RGB332, RGB565 and grayscale + 1bit mode render targets. ICC based management of RGB user/device spaces is supported through babl.

deferred rendering
Tokenizing the rasterization as a protocol is core to ctx' operation. Issuing a draw command prepares a token that is either appended to a drawlist or acted upon immediately; depending on the configuration of the context. Drawlists can be converted to both compact and verbose textual representation with little overhead. These drawlist representations are used for scanline/chunk-based rendering on microcontrollers where framebuffer is to large to fit in RAM and threaded cached rendering through SDL2 and /dev/fb0 backends and network transparent rendering inside ctx terminal. .
text rendering
UTF8 native, there is three font backends driven by stb_trutetype reading glyph paths on demand from a TTF/OTF file loaded in RAM/ROM.
Using binary ctx drawlist representation, separated by '@' define-glyph commands.
And an experimental backend permits rendering each glyph loaded on-the fly from the filesystem as ctx ascii protocol, combined with a UI shape editor, ctx would have a live font-editor.
The text-shaping is currently limited to horizontal advances + horizontal kerning, no ligatures - interacting directly with harfbuzz could give us wider support.
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
The core rasterizer is C99 code that also compiles as C++, with simple make basd build system and only optional dependencies, and thus should run on most CPU architectures.
VT4xx, ECMA-48
Almost full vt100 and vt220 escape sequence handling, scrollback, like xterm, dterm window manipulation (among tabs/clients), bracketed paste, 256 and 24bit colors are supported - as well as a growing subset of vt420 and other relevant terminal escape sequences.
ametameric palette
The terminal 16 color palette is optimized for legibility for both main varieties dichromats as well as trichromats.
sixels
DEC terminal family standard for raster graphics transfer
kitty graphics
kitty style raster graphics transfer
iterm2 inline images
iterm2 style raster grarphics transfer
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

The single header and static binaries for download are autogenerated together with this website each time the git repository is synched.

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/versioned release of ctx. The single header ctx.h linked from this page is a rolling release.

directions