cmuratori/refterm

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1827 stars · 70 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

refterm is a reference renderer for monospace terminal displays written in C, demonstrating that sensible design achieves reasonable frame rates even with slow Unicode parsing and glyph generation. It serves as a performance baseline that modern terminals should meet or exceed.

Use cases

• benchmark terminal rendering throughput
• reference implementation for terminal glyph rendering
• test VT code and Unicode parsing performance
• learn how tile-based terminal rendering works
• compare terminal emulator performance against a baseline
• study glyph caching for monospace displays

When to choose

• you need a performance baseline for terminal rendering
• you are building a terminal and want a reference for glyph caching and VT parsing
• you want to benchmark Windows terminal throughput

When to avoid

• you need a full-featured daily-driver terminal emulator
• you need a highly optimized production renderer
• you need cross-platform support beyond Windows

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

graphics parser caching developer-tools performance windows cpp terminal-renderer monospace glyph-cache vt-parser unicode directwrite uniscribe tile-rendering reference-implementation utf-8 command-line gpu

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cmuratori/refterm")