Terminal (TUI)

Play GemStone IV wherever a terminal reaches — over SSH, on a Raspberry Pi, in a tmux split next to your scripts — with the same layout, highlights, and keybinds as the desktop client.

What it’s for

You already have a terminal open. The TUI puts your whole character in it: the same windows, the same highlight rules, the same numpad movement macros as the Desktop GUI, drawn on a character grid instead of pixels. It is what a hand-typed vellum-fe command gives you by default, and it is the only frontend that survives a session over SSH on a machine with no desktop at all.

It is not a stripped-down mode. Mouse works — for links, scrolling, selection, dragging windows, and right-click menus. And the TUI keeps its own window editor, a full-screen form you open with .editwindow; the GUI’s separate editor was retired in favor of a right-click menu, so this form has no direct counterpart over there.

Set it up

Working with windows

Everything in this section is mouse-and-keyboard in the terminal itself.

Move a window by left-dragging its title bar — the top row, and only the top row. (The GUI lets you drag from anywhere; the TUI reserves the body for text selection.) A window locked in place can still be grabbed there, but will not move.

Resize a window by dragging its right column, bottom row, or the bottom-right corner cell. Two details save you a puzzled minute: the bottom row only acts as a handle when the window is taller than two rows, and the right column only when it is wider than one — so a single-row bar’s bottom row stays content, not a grab handle. A locked window resizes nowhere.

Right-click a title bar for Close Window, Edit Window…, and Open Menu. (Close Window is not offered on main or command_input.) Right-clicking the performance overlay opens its own metrics toggle menu instead.

Add, hide, delete, and restore windows by command:

.deletewindow truly deletes in both the TUI and the GUI, and .hidewindow hides in both — there is no asymmetry to remember. Both refuse to remove your only main-feed window. There is no standalone .showwindow; restoring is the .menu route or .loadlayout.

The window editor

.editwindow (or .editwin) opens a full-screen form for the focused window, or .editwindow <name> for a specific one — the same form the title-bar right-click reaches via Edit Window…. It is keyboard-driven, and the bottom border always tells you the keys for wherever you are.

The base footer reads [Ctrl+S: Save] [Esc: Cancel]. Step into a sub-editor and it changes to match: reorderable lists show [Ctrl+S: Save]─[Shift+↑/↓: Reorder]─[Esc: Cancel], and the stream picker shows [Enter: Add stream]─[Esc: Back].

That Ctrl+P picker is the one to remember. Subscribing a window to a stream normally means typing an id you have to already know; on the Streams field it lists what Lich has actually pushed this session, and Enter appends the highlighted id to the field. It does nothing on any other field, so if it seems dead, check which field has focus.

Keys you get out of the box

These are the defaults in keybinds.toml, and every one of them is rebindable with .keybinds.

Text and windows

Numpad movement, pre-bound

num_1–num_9 walk the compass the way the keypad is laid out (1=southwest, 2=south, 3=southeast, 4=west, 5=out, 6=east, 7=northwest, 8=north, 9=northeast). num_0 goes down and num_decimal goes up. num_plus sends look, num_minus sends info, num_multiply sends exp, and num_divide sends health.

Editing the command line — these are fixed terminal conventions rather than entries in keybinds.toml: Ctrl+A select all, Ctrl+C copy, Ctrl+X cut, Ctrl+V paste, Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+Shift+Z redo, Ctrl+E jump to end, Ctrl+U clear the line, Ctrl+W delete the word behind the cursor.

As you type, the newest history entry sharing your prefix appears as muted text from the cursor onward. Tab accepts it. When there is no suggestion and no dot-command completion pending, Tab falls back to switching windows. The suggestion uses the theme’s text_secondary color; set completion_color on the command-input window to change it.

Selecting, copying, and clicking

Drag across text to select it, and it copies to your clipboard the moment you release the mouse — no second keystroke. That is selection_auto_copy, on by default. Copy is plain text by design; styling is deliberately not carried to the clipboard.

Clicking game text does what the markup says: a URL opens your browser, a command link sends its command, a coordinate link runs its command list, and a plain noun asks the server for its context menu and shows what comes back. Ctrl+drag a link onto a hand, a container, an inventory row, or another link to send _drag, which is how you move an item without typing a target.

Common setups

A 256-color terminal that still looks right

Some terminals — an older xterm, a locked-down remote console — cap at 256 colors, and true color output turns muddy. Start with vellum-fe --port 8000 --character YourName --color-mode slot --setup-palette. Slot mode maps your configured colors into palette slots and --setup-palette programs them into the terminal at startup. If you change colors mid-session, run .setpalette to reprogram, and .resetpalette to hand the terminal’s own palette back before you exit.

You’ll see: your named highlight colors rendering as the exact hues you chose in .colors, instead of the nearest muddy approximation.

A layout that survives a terminal resize

Arrange your windows by dragging title bars and edges, then save with .savelayout hunting. When you later stretch the terminal or drop into a different-sized tmux pane, run .resize to refit the saved arrangement to the new dimensions rather than rebuilding it. .layouts lists what you have saved, and .loadlayout hunting brings it back — including on the Desktop GUI, which reads the same pool.

You’ll see: your combat window still occupying the right third of the screen after the pane changes size, rather than clipped off the edge or stranded in the middle.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ In the TUI, Ctrl+C copies your selection — it does not quit. A raw-mode terminal owns its own keys, so nothing intercepts it. To leave, type .quit or .exit. In the Desktop GUI the same combination quits, because there the OS delivers it beneath the key layer. This is the one difference most likely to bite you when you switch frontends.

⚠️ .quit disconnects but keeps the client open by default. Run it again, or use .exit, to close. Change it with ui.keep_open_on_quit in Settings.

• The terminal cannot render images, and that is by design, not a missing feature. Skins, per-window background art, and the graphical injury doll, compass, and hand icons are GUI-only forever — there are no pixels inside a character cell. The TUI shows the same underlying information with glyphs and color, so nothing about your character is hidden from you. If a layout you built in the GUI has skin frames, they load without complaint and simply have nothing to draw.
• .setpalette needs slot mode. On direct (true color) it has nothing to program. Pair it with --color-mode slot.
• Reset the palette before you leave a shared terminal. .resetpalette restores the terminal’s own colors; without it a multiplexer session can keep your palette after you disconnect.
• Use a Nerd Font if you want the default countdown glyphs and compass rendering exactly as designed. Without one they fall back to plainer characters.
• There is no Launcher in the terminal. It is an egui window, so it is GUI-only. Start a saved connection from a terminal with --launch-profile "<name>".
• A one-row window has no bottom resize handle. That is deliberate — its bottom row is content. Resize it from the right column instead, or adjust it in .editwindow.
• .menu has no default keybind. Type it, or use Open Menu from a title-bar right-click.

See also

• Frontends overview — all five, and how to choose
• Desktop GUI — the mouse-first counterpart with skins and toolbar hubs
• Mobile Web — joining a TUI session from your phone
• Widgets — what can go in a window
• Configuration Files — keybinds, highlights, colors