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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)?

#31

I like termbox. I'm the Ada binding maintainer. A quick search and you can find many other language bindings. https://github.com/bmsauer/termbox-ada

Looks like the project is no longer being maintained (as of two weeks ago?), so it kind of pours water on that idea (unless you or someone else is going to take over the main library maintainer work).

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

#34

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.

I used this for a couple of toy programs when I worked through last year's Advent of Code. I found that it worked well and enjoyed using it, but again these were for toy programs.

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

#35
post #12

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/brick is popular in the Haskell world.

came to mention Brick too. The advantage is that it follows the unidirectional data flow pattern. Aka the Elm architecture. the advantage is that the whole interface is drawn from the data. (or the view is generated only from the model). This simplifies development a lot.

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

#36
post #26
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)

Sorry, I don't know how popular it is with respect to similar solutions.

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

#37

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 wi…

So, lynx? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

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

#38
For small CLI tools, I find the following nodejs packages pretty helpful:

- [commanderjs] lets you easily build ergonomic CLI apps (wires up --help and usage descriptions) --- https://github.com/tj/commander.js/

- [chalk] colors in the terminal --- https://github.com/chalk/chalk

- [figlet] big splash text --- https://www.npmjs.com/package/figlet

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