Term50

Term50 is a terminal emulator for BlackBerry 10. It uses libghostty-vt as its terminal parser/state model and renders the visible grid directly through the BB10 Screen API + FreeType. It runs multiple shells as tabs, and is configured and scripted in Lua (~/.term.lua).

The current release requires OS version >= 10.3.

Building

You need the BlackBerry 10 NDK (for qcc and the packager) and Nix (for the bbnix userland, bundled Fen CLI, and bundled font staging). Everything links against headers + libraries that ship with the NDK (libscreen, libbps, libfreetype, libicu*, libclipboard); there are no vendored ARM prebuilts.

Third-party source lives under vendor/ as submodules (libghostty-vt, Lua 5.4). After cloning:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Compile the binaries (inside the BBNDK shell, e.g. nix run .#shell from the bbdev workspace):

make            # builds Term50 + termctl

Packaging & deploying

bbnix is a required dependency: it supplies the login shell (zsh), the terminfo database, and ssh/tmux/mosh. Term50 also bundles the BB10 Fen coding-agent CLI as fen on $PATH. The package targets stage bbnix, Fen, and the curated font bundle automatically, so they need Nix and a BB10 sysroot (BBNIX_SYSROOT); bbnix/Fen builds are impure.

export BBNIX_SYSROOT=/path/to/bbndk-linux
make package-dev      # stage bbnix + Fen + fonts, build, package a dev-mode Term50.bar
make deploy           # package-dev, then install + launch on the device

Device credentials for deploy/connect live in an untracked .env — copy .env.example to .env and set BBIP/BBPASS.

Distributing

make package-release  # optimized, non-devMode Term50.bar

BlackBerry's code-signing / BBID servers are gone, so the bar can't be signed. Distribute the unsigned release bar by sideloading (Sachesi, or blackberry-deploy to a device with Development Mode on).

Tabs

Each tab owns its own pty, child shell, and Ghostty bridge (so its own scrollback); background tabs keep consuming output. Default tab keys sit under metamode (double-tap the metamode key — right shift by default — then a letter), mirroring tmux's window keys:

Metamode key	Action	tmux analogue
c	tab_new	prefix c
n	tab_next	prefix n
p	tab_prev	prefix p
x	tab_close	prefix &

A one-row tab strip appears at the top when more than one tab is open (and flashes in on any tab action or top-edge tap); tap a numbered pill to jump to a tab or + to open one. All four actions are also callable from Lua, e.g. term.action("tab_new"). The app quits once the last tab is gone.

Configuration & control surface

~/.term.lua configures keybindings and scripts the terminal; see share/term.lua.reference for the full reference. Term50 also exposes a term:// URI invoke target and an in-sandbox control socket (termctl) for notifications and tab control — the bundled share/AGENTS.md (also at $TERMCTL_AGENT_DOC on-device) documents both surfaces.

See also

• Term48 in BlackBerry AppWorld