Bringing Terminals to Life
A Journey into CLAP Plugins with FTXUI
This talk is the story of an experiment: learning the CLAP plugin architecture by building a plugin from scratch—and rendering its entire interface using FTXUI, a C++ terminal UI library. The goal wasn’t to reinvent the meter, but to explore plugin development in a playful, minimal, and fully custom way.
Along the way, I learned a lot about CLAP internals, UI integration challenges, and the joys and constraints of using a text-based rendering engine inside a real DAW. This session is both a deep dive into plugin architecture and a celebration of unconventional tooling.
Kevin Molcard
Kevin Molcard is a music technology professional with over 18 years of experience in audio software development. He spent the majority of his career at Arturia, where he progressed from software engineer to Director of Research & Development, leading innovation across a range of virtual instruments and audio products. Today, he works as a freelance developer and consultant, supporting companies in the music tech industry with software engineering, product strategy, and team organization.