revenant-intro(7)
REVENANT-INTRO(7)Revenant ManualREVENANT-INTRO(7)

Name

revenant-intro – xterm-compatible X11 terminal with a libghostty core

Revenant

Revenant is an X11 terminal emulator that looks, configures, and behaves like xterm, with libghostty-vt as its terminal core.

If you already run xterm, Revenant is meant to be a drop-in replacement: the same XTerm resource class, the same vt100 widget, the same Ctrl+button popup menus, the same ~/.Xresources lines. If you have never run xterm, this documentation starts from zero — including the X11 configuration mechanism that xterm inherits and that most modern terminals never had.

Expect to configure it

Revenant starts with xterm's defaults on purpose: the fixed bitmap font, an 80x24 window, and 1024 lines of history. The traditional fixed bitmap font is often too small on a modern high-density display. Shipping useful modern defaults is a future goal; today a few ~/.Xresources lines are part of the first run, and Revenant tells you which ones:

revenant -welcome

The report audits your X resources, fonts, and tools without changing anything, and prints a starter fragment when it detects that the unconfigured bitmap default may be difficult to read. The first-run guide explains the rest.

Two product bars

Revenant has two requirements that pull in different directions, and the project keeps both honest:

  1. xterm fidelity. xterm patch 411 defines the visible X11 contract: resources, menus, translations, geometry, fonts. Anything xterm shows the user, Revenant tries to show the same way.
  2. Modern terminal capability. libghostty-vt supplies parsing, terminal state, reflow, history, key encoding, and query responses. xterm compatibility shapes how a feature is exposed; it never justifies leaving a basic capability unwired.

Where the two conflict, the difference is written down rather than hidden: intentional departures live in the xterm differences ledger, unfinished work in the roadmap, and every menu entry and command-line option is classified in the compatibility section.

Where to go

  • Installing or building it Install covers the release packages, the full libghostty-vt build, and the stub build for UI work.

  • Your first window First run starts with revenant -welcome, the resources that make xterm's defaults readable, then menus, keys, and fonts.

  • New to xterm and X11? Start with X resources, explained. It is written for people who have never seen a .Xresources file.

  • Copying and pasting Learn why X11 has PRIMARY, CLIPBOARD, and cut buffers, which one mouse selection uses, and what Shift+Insert actually pastes.

  • Opening terminal hyperlinks Learn how explicit and detected links use Shift-hover and Shift+Button 1, and why only HTTP and HTTPS targets launch.

  • Coming from xterm? Go straight to Configuring Revenant and the command-line feasibility table to see which of your options already work. Also read the major default keyboard-input difference: Revenant deliberately distinguishes Ctrl-I from Tab, Ctrl-M from Enter, and Ctrl-[ from Escape without application opt-in.

  • Choosing text, CJK, emoji, and fallback fonts Use the dedicated font configuration guide for working Xft examples, xterm's two-entry chain grammar, role ordering, and the current expanded-resolver rollout status.

  • Something looks wrong Diagnostics explains -report-config, the structured log, and the CPU profiling helper. The interactive probe suite provides named visual and keyboard fixtures for comparing Revenant, xterm, and Ghostty.

  • Writing a terminal application or emulator The Terminal Developers Network explains control protocols, their history, compatibility differences, and reproducible probes.

Status

Revenant is early. Today it runs a real PTY-backed shell, renders the libghostty grid through Xlib bitmap fonts or Xft, handles resize with reflow, scrollback with the real Athena scrollbar, font switching from the font menu or Shift+keypad, named X11 selection with middle-button paste, hyperlinks, application mouse and focus reporting, synchronized output (DEC private mode 2026), the sixteen-color ANSI palette, and the mode toggles in the main and VT menus. Startup cursor-shape resources (cursorUnderLine, cursorBar) and application-selected block, underline, and bar cursors and blink requests work now; Kitty graphics are on the roadmap. Menu entries and options that are not implemented yet stay visible but insensitive, so the UI never claims more than the code delivers.

RevenantSeptember 23, 2026REVENANT-INTRO(7)