xfce4-terminal and VTE: readable colours, braille-capable default font

Development repository for two changes to the mariux64 packages vte-0.84.1-1 and xfce4-terminal-1.1.5-1 (see vte.be0 and xfce4-terminal.be0, as committed in bee-files):

Minimum contrast (VTE). Text whose WCAG 2 contrast ratio against its background is below 3.0 (white on light grey, dark blue on black, yellow on grey, …) is drawn lighter or darker, keeping its hue. Only the drawing changes: normal text, selection, the character under the cursor and input-method text; the colours applications chose stay as they are. Text deliberately hidden with the same text and background colour is left alone, and dim text gets half the margin. On by default for every VTE terminal, GTK 3 and GTK 4. The ratio is the property VteTerminal:minimum-contrast (1.0 = off) or VTE_MINIMUM_CONTRAST in the environment.
View → Minimum Contrast (xfce4-terminal). A menu item (also in the context menu's View Options) and the saved preference misc-minimum-contrast, default on. It is shown only if VTE has the property above.
Hack Braille as the default font (xfce4-terminal). Hack 3.003 plus the braille patterns U+2800–U+28FF, which TUIs such as btop use for graphs and which most monospace fonts lack. All four styles are compiled in and registered with fontconfig from memory at startup; nothing is installed. A font set in the preferences still wins.

The same changes exist for xterm (minimumContrast resource, embedded Hack Braille); Hack Braille itself is made by mkhackbraille.py from that work.

Layout

Path	Content
`vte-0.84.1/`	VTE sources, with history: upstream import, bee patch, our commits
`xfce4-terminal-1.1.5/`	xfce4-terminal sources, the same way
`*.patch`	The patches the bee files apply, as stored in md5repo
`vte.be0`, `xfce4-terminal.be0`	The bee files
`mkdeb.sh`	Builds a .deb for Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint
`mkdeb-jammy.sh`, `vte-0.84.1-glib-icu-jammy.patch`	The same for Ubuntu 22.04 and Linux Mint 21
`screenshots/`	Test screenshots

The patches are git diffs of the two source trees: vte-0.84.1-min-contrast.patch from the "bee:" commit to the top of vte-0.84.1/; xfce4-terminal-1.1.5-embedded-font.patch and xfce4-terminal-1.1.5-minimum-contrast-toggle.patch from the "bee:" commit, one commit each.

Sources

Not in this repository; fetched from beehive (md5 in the URL):

vte-0.84.1.tar.xz
xfce4-terminal-1.1.5.tar.xz
hack-braille-3.003.tar.gz: the four Hack Braille TTFs, licence, README and generator. Unpack it into xfce4-terminal-1.1.5/ before building xfce4-terminal.

VTE's bundled subprojects (fast_float, fmt, simdutf) are in the repository as plain files, without the .git directories the tarball ships.

Building and testing

VTE (meson; GTK 3 only is enough for xfce4-terminal):

meson setup build-vte vte-0.84.1 --buildtype=debugoptimized \
    -Dgtk4=false -Dgir=false -Dvapi=false -Dglade=false -Ddocs=false \
    --force-fallback-for=fast_float,simdutf --wrap-mode=nofallback
ninja -C build-vte

xfce4-terminal is built in its source directory through autogen.sh, as bee does (this also turns on maintainer mode, which the man page needs):

curl -fsSLO https://beehive.molgen.mpg.de/9d3164696416dac1787155b809fd6787/hack-braille-3.003.tar.gz
cd xfce4-terminal-1.1.5
tar xzf ../hack-braille-3.003.tar.gz
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-nls
make

Run it against the new VTE, isolated from a running xfce4-terminal and from the user's settings:

dbus-run-session -- env XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$(mktemp -d) \
    LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PWD/../build-vte/src \
    terminal/xfce4-terminal --disable-server

Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint package

Tested on Linux Mint 22.3 (Ubuntu 24.04). Build dependencies:

sudo apt install meson ninja-build python3 g++ \
    libglib2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libpango1.0-dev libcairo2-dev \
    libpcre2-dev liblz4-dev libgnutls28-dev libfribidi-dev libicu-dev \
    libsystemd-dev libxfce4ui-2-dev libxfce4util-dev libxfconf-0-dev \
    libgtk-layer-shell-dev xfce4-dev-tools gtk-doc-tools autoconf \
    automake libtool gettext autopoint xsltproc docbook-xsl curl

libvte-2.91-dev is not needed: build VTE as above, then point xfce4-terminal's configure at it instead of the step above:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PWD/../build-vte/meson-uninstalled \
    ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --disable-nls
make

On a file system without symlinks (such as a CIFS share), meson leaves out libvte-2.91.so and libvte-2.91.so.0, and linking fails with cannot find -lvte-2.91. Copy the library to both names after each VTE build:

cd build-vte/src
for n in libvte-2.91.so libvte-2.91.so.0; do cp libvte-2.91.so.0.8400.1 $n; done

Then ./mkdeb.sh writes build-deb/xfce4-terminal_1.1.5-1+mc1_amd64.deb:

sudo apt install ./build-deb/xfce4-terminal_1.1.5-1+mc1_amd64.deb

The package puts the patched VTE in /usr/lib/xfce4-terminal-vte, where xfce4-terminal finds it through its RUNPATH. The system libvte-2.91-0 and the programs using it, such as gnome-terminal, stay as they are. The package registers xfce4-terminal as x-terminal-emulator (priority 40). mkdeb.sh relinks terminal/xfce4-terminal in place with that RUNPATH; running it with LD_LIBRARY_PATH as above still uses build-vte/.

Ubuntu 22.04 and Linux Mint 21

A package built on 24.04 does not install on 22.04 (jammy): it needs newer glibc and libraries. mkdeb-jammy.sh builds one on jammy itself, in a build directory on a local disk (default ~/build-jammy), and writes build-deb/xfce4-terminal_1.1.5-1+mc1~jammy_amd64.deb. Jammy differs in several ways:

xfce4-terminal 1.1.5 needs libxfce4ui 4.17.5 or later; jammy has 4.16.1. The script builds libxfce4util 4.18.1 and libxfce4ui 4.18.4 (the versions of Ubuntu 24.04) and puts them next to VTE in /usr/lib/xfce4-terminal-vte.
VTE 0.84.1 claims GLib 2.72 and ICU 4.8, but uses G_NO_INLINE (GLib 2.74), _g_type_once_init_* (GLib 2.80) and ucnv_clone() (ICU 71). vte-0.84.1-glib-icu-jammy.patch defines them for older versions, as the newer ones would with VTE's GLIB_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED of 2.72. The script applies it to a copy of vte-0.84.1/.
VTE needs meson 1.3.2 or later and g++ 12; jammy has meson 0.61 and g++ 11. The script runs meson from its release tarball and uses g++-12.
jammy's xfce4-dev-tools 4.16 cannot run autogen.sh, so the script copies xfce4-terminal-1.1.5/ with the configure, Makefile.in files and man page generated on 24.04. Build xfce4-terminal there first, as above.

Tarballs the script expects next to it, checked against their sha256:

curl -fsSLO https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/34/e8/bb0e264882a42f5d5acae869d5980f298ff9c298d844e18fd1ac009ce7e9/meson-1.5.2.tar.gz
curl -fsSLO https://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/libxfce4util/4.18/libxfce4util-4.18.1.tar.bz2
curl -fsSLO https://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/libxfce4ui/4.18/libxfce4ui-4.18.4.tar.bz2

Build dependencies on Linux Mint 21:

sudo apt install gcc-12 g++-12 ninja-build python3 make pkg-config patch \
    dpkg-dev intltool libglib2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev libpango1.0-dev \
    libcairo2-dev libpcre2-dev liblz4-dev libgnutls28-dev libfribidi-dev \
    libicu-dev libsystemd-dev libxfconf-0-dev libsm-dev libice-dev \
    libgtk-layer-shell-dev

Then, on the jammy system:

./mkdeb-jammy.sh

Licences

VTE: mostly LGPL 3, parts GPL 3 and others (see vte-0.84.1/COPYING.README); the bundled subprojects carry their own licences. xfce4-terminal: GPL-2.0-or-later (xfce4-terminal-1.1.5/COPYING). Hack Braille: as Hack, MIT and the Bitstream Vera License (in the font tarball). The changes here are under the licence of the project they change.

mariux64/xfce4-terminal

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