MacTelnet is not only an application, it is a platform for creating your own software.
What are you making?
- An application requiring a virtual terminal
- A script to automate a MacTelnet task
- An enhancement to MacTelnet itself
An application requiring a virtual terminal
MacTelnet is first and foremost a terminal emulation program. It provides very accurate support for a family of VT terminals (VT100 ANSI, VT100 in VT52 mode, VT220, and to an extent XTerm), and this is constantly improving.
If you develop applications that rely on virtual terminals such as MacTelnet, you will find the following resources invaluable:
- VT100.net - a fantastic source of manuals, and more, for various VT terminals
- GNU ncurses library - an abstraction allowing text screen programs to achieve terminal effects in a way that is independent of the actual emulator being used
- Python curses library - one of the simplest ways to interact with terminals, using a library built into a scripting environment
If you have a terminal emulation test case that does not work correctly with MacTelnet (and does on some other terminal), please submit a bug report so that MacTelnet may be improved.
A script to automate a MacTelnet task
The Python programming language can be used to automate some tasks in MacTelnet. There are new scripting APIs known as Quills, which are covered in detail on the Quills page.
Quills is very flexible; you can set up callbacks so that MacTelnet visits your code only as needed, or you can write sequential scripts that perform a task without even using a GUI.
Previous versions of MacTelnet have used AppleScript for automation, but this is now strongly deprecated in MacTelnet 4. Please see the AppleScript page for more information, and for help on learning Python from an AppleScript perspective.
An enhancement to MacTelnet itself
Python can be used to customize certain MacTelnet features. For more information, see the Quills page.
If you would like to contribute a translation of MacTelnet to another language, please see the localization page.
If you want to learn how MacTelnet works at the lowest level (C++) and possibly contribute, use the resources below and feel free to contact the lead developer about any of this.
- MacTelnet on SourceForge - complete project management,
providing (among other things):
- Subversion repository access to check out source code
- Bug tracking to report defects
- MacTelnet on Google Groups - join and talk to the developers and users
- Source distributions - download the code to build MacTelnet for yourself (important: during betas, the Subversion head revision is much more up to date than any source code release)
- Code documentation - a very detailed reference to the entire C++ code base, generated by Doxygen
The top level of the Subversion repository trunk contains a few plain text files with very simple overview documentation, a great place to start learning about the structure of the project.