# cmuratori/refterm

Reference monospace terminal renderer

Repository: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/refterm
Language: C
License: GPL-2.0
License Family: copyleft
Last push: 2025-01-10T22:04:17+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 23/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 1903, "days_push": 600, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1827, forks 70 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:41.421091+00:00)

## What it is
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
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: graphics, parser, caching
- domain: developer-tools, performance
- platform: windows, cpp
- tags: terminal-renderer, monospace, glyph-cache, vt-parser, unicode, directwrite, uniscribe, tile-rendering, reference-implementation, utf-8, command-line, gpu

## Member repositories
- cmuratori/refterm (main) score 23

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:41.421091+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:19:25.335253+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:41.421091+00:00, sha 424e6f2cc2a2)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.