DTerminal 🦖

A full-featured terminal docked inside the Delphi IDE.

DTerminal is an open-source, design-time Delphi IDE plugin that embeds a real terminal directly into RAD Studio / Delphi. It gives you a native Command Prompt (CMD), PowerShell, and WSL (Linux) shell without leaving your development environment — with color output, cursor handling, scrolling, copy/paste and command interruption.

It is built on top of the Windows ConPTY API, so it renders real VT/ANSI output through a custom screen buffer and VT parser.

Usability

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✨ Features

• Dockable inside the IDE — registers as a dockable form via the Open Tools API, persists across Design and Debug layouts.
• Multi-terminal tabs — open as many CMD, PowerShell or WSL shells as you want, each in its own tab.
• True VT rendering — SGR colors (16/256/RGB), bold/italic/underline/inverse, cursor positioning, scroll regions, alternative screen buffer and OSC window titles.
• Scrollback — scroll back through output history (mouse wheel / scrollbar).
• Copy & paste — select with the mouse and copy (Ctrl+C / context menu), paste with Ctrl+V or the context menu.
• Interrupt long-running commands — press Ctrl+Break (or Ctrl+Pause) to send an interrupt (#3, equivalent to Ctrl+C) to the foreground process. Great for ping -t, tail -f, custom servers, etc.
• History — arrow-up/down navigation on the input line (CMD/PowerShell/WSL shells provide their own history as well).
• Window titles — OSC 0;title sequences update the tab caption.
• Solid engine — UTF-8 aware reader, partial multibyte sequence handling, unicode-tolerant pipes, job objects to guarantee children are killed on close.

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🛠️ Requirements

• Windows 10 (build 18362 or later) / Windows 11 — required by the ConPTY API.
• Delphi (RAD Studio) with VCL and design-time package support — tested with the Delphi 12 series; older versions may need minor adjustments.
• WSL — only if you want to use the Linux/WSL terminal (optional).

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📦 Installation

1. Clone the repository and open DinosTerminal.dproj in Delphi.
2. In the Project Manager, right-click the project and run, in this exact order:
   • 🧼 Clean
   • 🔨 Build
   • ⚡ Install
3. After installation, a new menu DinosTools appears in the IDE main menu.
4. Click DinosTools -> DinosTerminal to open the terminal.

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🚀 Usage

Opening a shell

• The first tab opens CMD automatically.
• Right-click the tab bar → New Terminal → choose CMD, WSL or PowerShell.
• Right-click a tab to rename or remove it (the default tab cannot be removed/renamed).

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+Break	Interrupt the running foreground command
Arrow up / down	Shell history / previous commands
Tab	Auto-completion (handled by the shell)

Copy / Paste

• Copy: select text with the mouse, then right-click → Copy.
• Paste: right-click → Paste.

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🧩 Architecture

The package is split into small, focused units under the Dinos.Terminal.* and WinAPI.* namespaces:

Unit	Responsibility
uMain.pas	TManangerTerminal — dockable form (INTACustomDockableForm) managing tabs and shell processes
uRegister.pas	OTA wizard that adds the DinosTools menu entry
WinAPI.ConPty.pas	Dynamic loading of the ConPTY API (CreatePseudoConsole, ResizePseudoConsole, ...) with build-number check
Dinos.Terminal.Pty.pas	TConPty — pipes + pseudo-console + job object (KILL_ON_JOB_CLOSE) + CreateProcess wiring
Dinos.Terminal.ConPtyReader.pas	Background thread that reads output and decodes UTF-8, keeping partial sequences intact
Dinos.Terminal.ConPtyShell.pas	ITerminalProcess implementation — lifecycle, resize, interrupt, exit events
Dinos.Terminal.ScreenBuffer.pas	Cell-based screen buffer: colors, styles, scrollback, scroll regions, alt-screen
Dinos.Terminal.VTParser.pas	CSI / OSC / SGR / control-character parser driving the screen buffer
Dinos.Terminal.TerminalView.pas	Painting control: cell runs, xterm palette, cursor, selection, scrolling
Dinos.Terminal.KeyInput.pas	Key strokes → VT sequences (arrows, Home/End, F1-F12, Ctrl+C/V/Z)
Dinos.Terminal.Frame.pas	Ties everything together per tab and implements the local input line
Dinos.Terminal.Interrupt.pas	Low-level keyboard hook for Ctrl+Break interrupt handling
Dinos.Terminal.Debug.pas	Structured logging and global exception handler (writes to %TEMP%\DinosTerminal.log)

 TTerminalView <──> TScreenBuffer <──> TVTParser <── TConPtyReader (thread) <── ConPTY
│ ▲ │
│ └──── keyboard ─► TKeyToVT ────► TConPtyShell ─► TConPty ─► CreateProcess
└──── selection / scroll / paint (pipes + job + pty)

Debugging: a verbose log is written to %TEMP%\DinosTerminal.log. Check it when reporting bugs.

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🧑‍💻 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a feature branch.
3. Make sure the package Clean → Build → Install with no warnings related to your change.
4. Open a Pull Request describing the change and how to test it.

Bug reports and feature requests go to the issue tracker.

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📄 License

MIT License. See LICENSE.