impress terminal. GTK+ 3 cross-platform version

Overview

The impress library uses a separate application to low-level drawing.

The main GUI application contains pure Go code. There is not any low-level library required to build the main application. The impress terminal is running in parallel. Impress terminal was written in C and used the GTK-3 library. Named pipes are used to communicate between the main application and impress terminal.

Impress terminal started and stopped by main application. By default, executable impress terminal binary launched from current directory. The environment variable IMPRESS_TERMINAL_PATH may be used to specify full pathname to impress terminal binary.

Pros:

To compile the application, it is not necessary to install low-level libraries.
There are no additional restrictions on the application, such as GTK functions should only be called by the main thread.
It will be possible to run several applications for a low-level drawing from different devices, thereby using the screens of different devices for the same application.
Abnormal termination of low-level drawing application may not result in data loss.

Cons:

Some loss of speed due to data transfer between applications.
Additional complexity due to state synchronization between applications.

You can download the compiled binary it file or make it again from the source.

Building (Linux)

Install gcc, make, pkg-config if you don't have them installed.
Currently, the application uses GTK+ 3 for rendering, event collecting, etc. You should install libgtk+-3.0 and packages that depend on GTK. On Debian/ Ubuntu you can run:

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev

Build impress terminal from source:

git clone https://github.com/codeation/it.git
cd it
make
cd ..

Building (Debian 12 + docker)

To build binary without installing additional packages:

git clone https://github.com/codeation/it.git
cd it
./build.sh
cd ..

This command creates a container with libgtk-3-dev packages from the gcc compiler container. The build is done inside the docker container without installing additional packages on the host.

Once the build is complete, the docker images can be removed using the docker image rm command. You can remove containers named:

amd64/gcc or arm64v8/gcc
it-build/gcc

On Debian 12.0, libharfbuzz-gobject should be installed. If you are getting error while loading shared libraries: libharfbuzz-gobject.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory, run sudo apt-get install libharfbuzz-gobject0.

Building (macOS)

Install Homebrew if you don't have installed.
To install GTK+ 3 run:

brew install gtk+3

To install pkg-config run:

brew install pkg-config

Build impress terminal from source:

git clone https://github.com/codeation/it.git
cd it
make
cd ..

The latest releases aren't tested on Apple Silicon machines. The earlier version tested on both Intel and Silicon platform and worked well. Please, open issue, if some bugs have raised. MRs are welcome too.

Download

You can download the compiled binary it file on the "releases" page.

Github Actions builds binaries since v0.2.4 to prevent any corruption. Make sure the release is built from a signed commit.

Please, check and verify the sha256 sum for downloaded files from previous releases.

The codeation GPG key (Id A8109B6877BC845E) is used to sign commits in the main branch.

Source code

github.com/codeation/it

Issues

Feel free to open issue

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