This is a pretty inaccurate emulator of a VT52. I'm sure it's missing several features. I mostly wanted to make TUI programs work using TERM=vt52. I got my information about VT52s from the terminfo database, Wikipedia, and this page. The emulator runs inside another terminal emulator using (N)Curses.

This project requires a Curses library, a C99 compiler, and a POSIX environment. I couldn't make it completely POSIX-compliant due to a few necessary tty ioctls, but it probably works on many Unices. If you have the right environment, you can build it with make. The executable is called vt52ish.

To run an interactive Bash shell, something like this will work:

./vt52ish env PS1='$ ' bash --norc --noprofile

You can nest the emulator an arbitrary number of times:

./vt52ish ./vt52ish ./vt52ish env PS1='$ ' bash --norc --noprofile

Most simple ncurses programs that don't require colors will probably work to some extent in this terminal.

I wanted to make this mostly to try implementing a terminal emulator. I decided to emulate the VT52 because of the simplicity of its protocol.