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Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?

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Re: Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?

#21

Post by tabtab »

I've been looking for something similar that either has a markup language associated with it or is easy to add one to. I wish to prototype a GUI markup standard with it as a proof of concept so that we can have GUI-over-HTTP instead of live with the ever failing & bloated HTML/JS/DOM/CSS GUI emulators. So far, Terminal.Gui looks interesting, but I don't know if it's cross-platform yet.

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?

#24

Post by andrewstuart »

zephraph wrote: post #19

In the node ecosystem there are a few interesting ones. https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink for writing TUIs with react. Here's a project I wrote using that: https://github.com/zephraph/solitaire . It's not as powerful as ncurses, but it works rather well. If you want something more on par with ncurses try https://github.com/cronvel/terminal-kit

https://github.com/cronvel/terminal-kit

This is the one that most catches my attention.

Currently actively maintained plus it has something analagous to a document object model https://github.com/cronvel/terminal-kit/blob/master/doc/docu...

Also Ink is incredibly interesting as it enables ReactJS for creating TUI apps - mind bending!

https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

I can imagine the things above being combined with a sandbox plus Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS https://bellard.org/quickjs/ into a new type of application ..... the "pure text mode browser".

A "pure text mode browser" would not be designed to render ordinary HTML web pages, but would instead be a minimal browser designed only for text mode.

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?

#25

Post by rbanffy »

dheera wrote: post #2

I wrote a Python library to draw graphics in a console using Braille dots, with a fallback mode to ASCII: https://github.com/dheera/python-termgraphics I used it in ROSshow, which visualizes robot sensor data inside a terminal: https://github.com/dheera/rosshow

Teletext (also TRS-80) 2x3 mosaics got into Unicode 13. I hope Kaypro's 2x4 mosaics get into version 14.

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?

#26

Post by rbanffy »

andyv wrote: post #20

My favorite is the python-based Urwid library at http://www.urwid.org . It was a little hard for me to wrap my head around it at first, but once you get it, you can write TUI applications without a lot of code. Easy to install, many examples to work from.

How popular is it in the Python space? I loved the large text widget and would love to contribute with a font using the Teletext 2x3 mosaics that got into Unicode 13 (which are fully supported in VTE)

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?

#27

Post by Shared404 »

jamesponddotco wrote: post #13

aerc[1]'s design is the main reason why I use it over mutt, even though mutt has more features. No idea what they use behind the scenes for their TUI, but you could take a look at their source code[2]. [1] https://aerc-mail.org/ [2] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc

It looks like Tcell probably, assuming I've understood what Tcell does correctly.

https://github.com/gdamore/tcell/

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?

#28

Post by dsissitka »

andrewstuart wrote: post #3

This looks pretty impressive: Terminal.Gui - Terminal GUI toolkit for .NET https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs Written by Miguel de Icaza. Hanselman wrote on it here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/Its2020AndItIsTimeForTextMode... and here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DotnetDependsIsAGreatTextMode...

I’m curious about what other people think about this one. I tried the demo in a few terminals a couple months ago and it didn’t work well in any of them.
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