Unix “TTY” terminal programming is a hodgepodge of tribal lore. There’s no “Best Practices” guide nor canonical “quick start” tutorial. Even Bash (the shell) has wooledge and set -x. But terminal programming is a tenuous détente of undocumented conventions.

This post is a low-friction, self-contained tutorial for tinkering with your TTY and quickly seeing results. You can skip to the Two-minute tutorial to start trying things immediately.

Tooling

The tools for working with terminals are essentially:

  • printf (or echo, but printf works better)
  • script
  • expect
  • tmux/screen

References

The resources for learning about terminal details are:

Concepts

A “terminal emulator” sends user input and responds to terminal applications (such as bash or vim). See TTY demystified and Introduction to Termios for details.

Control sequences can be used to:

  1. Control the terminal
  2. Request info from the terminal
  3. Set terminal modes/options

Terminal emulators implement one or more historical terminal models. For example, XTerm emulates VT102 and VT220. The situation is not unlike HTML, where different web browsers may implement different HTML features or DOM functions.

Applications and terminals communicate via stdin and stdout—the same channels that receive user input and display user output. That “conflict of interest” is the reason your terminal gets messed up if you cat a binary file, or if you paste binary data into the terminal. The implications may be surprising:

  • You can control your terminal by the mere act of causing output (i.e., writing to stdout).
  • The terminal responds by causing input (i.e., writing to stdin).
    • It’s up to the application to interpret the response.
  • Applications use those mechanisms to work with the terminal. There’s no lower-level API. (There are high-level libraries, such as ncurses, libtickit, golang/term, etc.)

The OS has various concepts/objects which I call “OS primitives”: pipes, regular files, etc. One of those OS primitives is (pseudo) “terminal”. It’s like a pipe with extra behaviors (move the cursor, change current text color, etc.) controlled in-band with the “data” stream via special ESC sequences (hence why terminals get messed up when you cat a binary file.)

File operations (open(), read(), write(), …) are handled by a kernel driver. If you open() a regular file on an ext2 partition, it’s handled by the ext2 driver. If you open() a named pipe, it’s handled by the pipe driver (fs/pipe.c in Linux). And if you open a terminal device node, the terminal device driver handles the request.

pseudoterminal (pty)

From man pty:

The slave end of the pseudoterminal provides an interface that behaves exactly like a classical terminal.

pty driver has job control and other features, just like a tty driver, but it does not directly have access to the keyboard and display.

  • Key difference: tty displays output; pty (master end) merely holds data for reading.
  • In a normal tty, keyboard input caused data to become available for reading on the terminal device handle (file descriptor); in contrast writing to a pty master only makes the data available on the slave.
  • Writing to a normal (tty) terminal device handle prints to the screen; writing to a pty slave only makes the data available for reading on the master end. (Similar to a socket pair.)
  • For example if you echo CTRL-C (\x03) to the slave end of a pty, the master end receives it verbatim. But if \x03 is written to the master end, the pty driver sends SIGINT to the foreground process-group of the session controlled by the slave end, and the character itself cannot be seen on the slave end.
  • And just like a normal tty driver, if "\n" is written to the pty slave, the pty driver converts it to "\r\n" before the master sees it (because “line feed” is a control code that means “go to next line, column 1”); if you write "\n" to the pty master, it passes through verbatim (because this keyboard input has no special meaning, unlike CTRL-C).
  • Lifecyle of xterm (or any other terminal-emulator): xterm opens the pty master, then launches a shell that initially has the slave end as its stdin, stdout, and stderr. xterm forwards your keyboard input directly to the master end; that data goes through the kernel pty driver, which removes job control characters and and acts on them, and translates newlines and so on; then the shell, or whatever process is running in the shell, gets what’s left as input. When output is written into the slave end, the pty driver doesn’t touch job control characters, but still translates newlines; xterm reads it, parses the terminal control characters (color codes, cursor movement), acts on them, and prints out the rest in the window.
  • Notice that the pty driver is responsible for some parts of the protocol, but the terminal-emulator does the rest. It’s inconsistent and imperfect, but that’s how it is.

Controlling the terminal

Display the “a” byte

The most familiar feature of a terminal is display. Bytes sent to stdout are displayed if they aren’t “special”.

  1. Open a terminal and type “a”.
  2. The terminal writes the “a” byte (0x61) to stdin.
  3. The shell reads the input from stdin.
  4. The shell echoes “a” to stdout.
  5. The terminal displays it.

Sending printable characters is easy, because they’re mapped to your keyboard. To send control sequences we can use a tool like printf (shell) or write() (C).

Send a control sequence

This OSC control sequence sets the terminal title to “foo”:

ESC ] 0 ; f o o BEL

Your keyboard doesn’t have a button for that. (You could type “Escape, ], 0, …”, but it would be too slow: the meaning of “Escape” is time-sensitive.) Instead you can use the printf command to output the bytes as a batch.

printf '\033]0;foo\007'

Now your terminal title is “foo”.

printf '\033[1;31mwe did it.\033[0m' > /dev/pts/6

Craft a control sequence

The \033]0;foo\007 (OSC 0 ; f o o BEL) sequence was derived by inspecting the XTerm ctlseqs reference. Here are some guidelines for reading the reference:

  • The Control Characters section defines the code names:
    • OSC is ESC ], CSI is ESC [, …
    • The C0 (7-bit) controls are in the leftmost column. For example ESC ] is the 7-bit OSC control code, 0x9d is the 8-bit code.
  • 7-bit vs 8-bit mode:
    • OSC for example is ESC ] or 0x9d depending on “whether you requested 8-bit controls (S8C1T)”.
    • 7-bit controls (S7C1T) is most common, but 8-bit (S8C1T) is more “modern”.
    • Terminals by default don’t expect 7-bit controls unless you enable S8C1T mode.
  • ESC and other single-byte codes (ESC, BEL, CR) are ASCII characters. Find their octal or hexidecimal representation in man ascii or online.
    • ESC is octal \033, which is how we write ESC in a string.

For example using the reference for Operating System Commands:

OSC Ps ; Pt BEL

we can translate it to something we can write in a string:

  • The Control Characters section tells us that OSC is ESC ] (\033 followed by ]).
  • Ps can be 0, 1, 2, 3 (see the reference for their meanings).
  • ; is a literal “;”.
  • Pt can be a literal “?” depending on the kind of code.
  • BEL is an single-code ASCII code, thus 0x7 (or octal \07).

Now let’s send some control-sequences to the TTY.

Two-minute tutorial

In the following exercises you will control your terminal and request info from it, using tools you already have on your system. You can (mostly) copy-and-paste the commands and see results immediately.

Exercise 1: Move the cursor and write some (colored) text

Remember the notes about pseudoterminals (pty). Linux implements “Unix98” (“System V style”) ptys, this means opening /dev/ptmx returns a new pty master file descriptor and the slave end appears as /dev/pts/N.

Open a terminal and run the tty command:

tty
/dev/pts/6

There it tells us that the pty slave is /dev/pts/6. Now in a different terminal we can write to the pty slave, to control its pty master.

In the ctlseqs reference we find:

  • ESC [ 4 B means “cursor down four times”.
  • ESC [ 4 C means “cursor forward four times”.

Let’s use that info to show “foo” in the middle of the tty:

printf '\033[4B\033[4Cfoo' > /dev/pts/6

From the ctlseqs reference:

  • ESC [ 45m means “set background color to magenta”.

If you set a color and write more text, it will print after “foo” (the terminal is stateful—it remembers the last cursor position).

printf '\033[45m' > /dev/pts/6
printf ' we did it' > /dev/pts/6

The terminal should look like this:

$



      foo we did it

Exercise 2: Send a status request

Some terminals (xterm, Vim/Nvim :terminal) support requests (DECRQSS). Open the terminal and input this command:

printf '\033P$qm\033\\' ; xxd

Hit Enter a few times until xxd shows the result, like this:

^[P1$rm^[\

00000000: 1b50 3124 726d 1b5c 0a0a 0a0a 0a0a 0a0a  .P1$rm.\........
          ^ ^  ^ ^  ^ ^  ^ ^  ^
          | P  1 $  r m  | \  |
          ESC            ESC  Enter (linefeed)

The ctlseqs reference “Request Status String (DECRQSS)” section explains what happened (DCS = ESC P):

DCS $ q Pt ST
      Request Status String (DECRQSS).  The string following the "q"
      is one of the following:
        " q     -> DECSCA
        " p     -> DECSCL
        r       -> DECSTBM
        s       -> DECSLRM
        m       -> SGR
        SP q    -> DECSCUSR
      xterm responds with DCS 1 $ r Pt ST for valid requests,
      replacing the Pt with the corresponding CSI string, or DCS 0 $
      r Pt ST for invalid requests.
  • We sent \033P$qm\033\\ and the terminal responded with ^[P1$rm^[\ (^[ means ESC).
  • Our request sent ST = m, so the response also gives ST = m.
  • The response gives DCS 1 (not DSC 0), so our request was valid.

Exercise 3: Set a terminal mode

Exercise for the reader: try to set S8C1T mode in your terminal, by using the reference.

Conclusion

In this post we learned that “terminal programming” involves sending special codes to the same(!) pipe as regular output. Any tool such as echo or printf (or the file-writing capabilities of any programming language) can control, request, and configure the terminal.

The details about the code sequences are documented in the xterm ctlseqs reference. Non-xterm terminals are mostly xterm-compatible, but also have their own custom codes. Every terminal application must “bring its own library” of terminal codes and do its best to emit the correct codes for the terminal it happens to be running in. There is no single standard (but xterm is the de facto standard).

Further reading is listed in References.