VTE (Virtual Terminal Emulator) is an open source and totally free library software that has been designed from the ground up to act as a terminal emulator widget for the GTK+ 2.0 (or higher) toolkit. It can be used by GNOME developers to inject terminal capability strings inside a tree of tables.
It is used by GNOME Terminal
VTE is a terminal widget used by the GNOME Terminal application, but it can also be used to embed a console/terminal in editors, IDEs, games, etc. VTE includes libvte, a library that implements a terminal emulator widget for GTK+, and the vte program, a sample application that wraps that widget in a GTK window.
Application options
The application features several options, such as the ability to disable the use of anti-aliasing, specify a background image, monitor /dev/console, highlight URLs inside a terminal emulator, disable rewrapping on resize, execute commands in the terminal, as well as to disable double-buffering.
Additionally, users will be able to disable spawning of a shell inside the terminal emulator, enable the use of a transparent background, use visible and audible alerts, enable the use of various debugging checks, set the position and size of the terminal and enable a distinct highlight color for selections.
The GNOME virtual terminal editor
Being associated with the GNOME project, VTE is also known as a virtual terminal editor program for the controversial GNOME graphical desktop environment, as well as for the powerful GTK+ toolkit.
Under the hood and availability
The software is written entirely in the C programming language and it’s distributed along with the GNOME project. It can be downloaded from its official website or via Softpedia as a universal tarball, which can be installed in any GNU/Linux distribution. VTE is also available on the default software repositories of many Linux distributions.
