harrier #

harrier is a terminal emulator: windows of tabs of panes, each pane showing a program, a serial port, or a message. These are the words its code, its documentation and its configuration use for the things in it.

Where Ghostty, whose terminal emulation harrier is built on, uses another word for the same thing, that word is listed under Avoid. A concept that exists on only one platform says so.

What a user sees #

Window: A terminal window: one or more tabs, and the decorations around them. Avoid: toplevel, surface

Tab: One or more panes arranged by splits, of which one has the focus.

Pane: One terminal in a tab, showing a program, a serial port, or a message. Avoid: terminal, split, surface

Split: Dividing a pane in two along an axis, and the division that results, with a divider between the two halves that can be dragged. Avoid: using "split" for either of the panes it makes

Decorations: Everything harrier draws in a window other than the terminal itself: the title bar, the frame, the tab bar, the status button, and overlays.

Title bar: The strip across the top of a window with its title and buttons, drawn either by harrier or by the desktop.

Subtitle: The second, smaller line of harrier's own title bar, showing the location of the focused pane in the shown tab.

Frame: The border of a window, by which it is resized.

Overlay: A decoration drawn over a pane rather than around it: the profile selector, the scrollback search field, a confirmation, a toast, the size shown while resizing, the progress bar, and the scrollbar.

Toast: A brief overlay saying what has just happened in a pane, such as its program copying to the clipboard. It asks nothing and goes away on its own, and a pane shows at most one. Avoid: notification (which is the desktop's), popup, banner, OSD

Cell: One position in a pane's grid of rows and columns, holding at most one grapheme or half of a wide one. Avoid: column (for a single position), character position

Grapheme: What a reader sees as one character: one code point, or several shown as one, such as a letter with its accents, a flag, or ➡️, which is ➡ asking to be shown as an emoji. Avoid: character, glyph (the shape a font draws), code point

Wide: Of a grapheme, taking two cells rather than one; most emoji and East Asian characters are wide. One taking a single cell is Narrow. Avoid: double-width, fullwidth

Program: What runs in a pane on a pseudo-terminal: a shell, an editor, ssh. Avoid: child, app, process, command (the command is how a program is started, not the program)

Foreground program: The program in a pane that the terminal currently belongs to: what the pane's program has handed it to and will take it back from, such as an editor, ssh, or a root shell. With nothing else running, it is the pane's program itself. Linux only; on Windows a pane has none. Avoid: foreground process, active process, current command, job

Location: Where a pane's program is: the directory it is in, and the machine, when that is not this one. Avoid: cwd, pwd, working directory, path

Hold: Whether a pane stays open after its program ends, to show how it ended: never, always, on failure, or when it did not succeed. A pane kept open this way is Held. Avoid: keep open, keep-terminal-open, linger

Bell: A program asking for the user's attention by ringing its pane's bell. A pane whose bell rang while the user was not looking at it is Rung until they do. Avoid: beep, alert, ding, urgent

Bell sound: What a pane's Bell plays when it rings: nothing, the desktop's own bell, or a sound file of the user's choosing. One is set for all panes, and a Profile may set its own for its panes. Avoid: beep, chime, alert sound

Confirmation: An overlay asking the user whether harrier should do what it was asked to: an Unsafe paste, or a program's Clipboard access. It waits on its pane until answered, and a pane has at most one. Avoid: dialog, prompt, popup

Unsafe paste: Text pasted into a pane that would run as it arrives: it holds a line break, and the program has not asked for bracketed paste. Avoid: dangerous paste, paste protection

Clipboard access: A program in a pane reading the clipboard or writing to it, by asking harrier to. Avoid: OSC 52 (except of the escape sequence itself), clipboard request

Primary selection: The second clipboard, which selecting text copies to and the middle button pastes from. "The clipboard" bare is always the other one. Linux only. Avoid: selection (bare, which is the marked text), X selection

Clipboard type: One of the forms the clipboard's contents are offered in -- plain text, an image, HTML -- each named by a MIME type. A program's Clipboard access may read or write any of them. Avoid: format, target, flavor

Profile: A named way of starting a pane: what it runs or connects to, where, with what environment and colors, in a new window or a tab, and whether elevated. A pane started from a profile starts its splits and new tabs from it too. Avoid: palette entry, entry

Profile selector: The overlay listing the profiles, narrowed to those matching what has been typed, from which one is opened. Avoid: command palette, palette (which is the 256-color palette)

Link: Something in a pane that ctrl+click opens: a hyperlink a program made (OSC 8), or a URL harrier recognized in the text. Avoid: hyperlink (except of OSC 8 itself), URL

Selection: Text marked in a pane by dragging over it, which can be copied: by cell, word or line, or as a rectangle. Avoid: highlight, marked text

Scrollback search: Finding text in a pane's scrollback. Avoid: search (bare), find

Shell search: GNOME Shell's search finding harrier's open panes and its profiles: a result names a pane, to show, or a profile, to start. Avoid: search (bare), search provider

Jump list: The list of harrier's open panes, and its profiles, that Windows offers on harrier's taskbar button, from which one is shown or started. Windows only; on GNOME, shell search is what finds a pane. Avoid: taskbar menu, recent items

Status report: One thing a program says about itself: its progress, or a status of its own with a state and a description. Avoid: record, mark, badge

Status window: The window listing every pane's status reports. It is not a Window.

Status button: The decoration showing the most pressing status report and how many there are.

Action: Something harrier can be told to do: open a tab, split a pane, scroll to the previous prompt.

Binding: A key mapped to an action. A Global binding works while harrier does not have the focus. Avoid: keybind, shortcut, hotkey

Elevated: Running as administrator. An Elevated launch asks Windows' own prompt and hands off to an elevated primary. Windows only. Avoid: admin, administrator mode, high integrity

Scope: The resource group each program runs in, of its own, so the desktop can account for and stop it separately from harrier. Linux only. Avoid: unit; cgroup, except as the name of the setting, which is named for the kernel's mechanism that users are likelier to know

Inside harrier #

Session: What runs behind a pane: the emulated terminal and its backend. A pane has one session for its whole life, and a session goes wherever its pane goes. Avoid: terminal (bare); "session" bare for the D-Bus session bus, an ssh session or a desktop session, which are always qualified

Backend: What is on the far side of a session: a Pty running a program, a Serial port, or a Message, text shown when a program could not be started. On Windows the pty is a pseudoconsole (ConPty), still a Pty. Avoid: using "backend" for the platform

Platform: The layer between harrier and the desktop it runs on: Wayland, or Win32. Avoid: platform backend

Primary: The harrier that owns the windows, to which every later launch hands off. On Windows there can be two, one elevated and one not. Avoid: instance, owner, the first harrier, activation

Hand-off: A later launch passing its request to the primary and exiting, rather than opening windows of its own. A Standalone harrier neither hands off nor becomes a primary. Avoid: activation, single-instance

Service: A primary the desktop starts when one is asked for, which exits once it has had no windows for a while. Linux only.

Request: One thing asked of the primary: a new window, a new tab, a split, or focus on a pane that already exists. It comes from the command line, a hand-off, a profile, Launch Command, or a split.

Launch Command: A desktop or launcher asking harrier, through the Terminal Intent, for a window with a tab for each command it names.