Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?

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

Turbo Vision, this is TUI perfection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

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...

https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs

Liked using this. I wrote a TUI for my company's api with it. I dont use the website much any more.

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.

Python includes bindings for curses and includes some pretty good documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/curses.html#curses-howto

You can't go wrong with Ncurses. Ancient, bindings to literally every language, stable and works everywhere including the kitchen sink.

The terminal is not meant to be existing. You are emulating 80 year old technology at the base of it.

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

Also take a look at Repl.it's "CLUI"[0] which they released fairly recently

[0] https://blog.repl.it/clui

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

Oberon. :-)

It's the granddaddy of all of them.

Overview: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/

Academic paper (but highly accessible): https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d48b/ecdaf5c3d962e2778f804e...

Yes, it's an OS as well as a language although a tiny one that runs under MacOS, Linux and Windows if you want. So does the bare language of the same name. (Think of it as Pascal 3.)

The inspiration behind Plan 9's Acme.

https://github.com/chjj/blessed is a curses-like library with a high level terminal interface API for node.js. It also has impressive demos.

Don't know why, but I have imagined a CSS framework for text only.

Edit: found one https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

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

For anyone who want to do it without a library it's actually really easy to get started with

  #include 
  #include 
  #include 

and follow the beginning chapters of the great "Build Your Own Text Editor" tutorial[0].

[0] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/02.enteringRawMode...

Check out the Interactive Fiction competition, it's text-based video games.

https://ifcomp.org/comp/2019

Two libraries for writing these games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TADS

TView is popular and active in the Golang world

https://github.com/rivo/tview

You could check out AsciiMatics. https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics

Here are some examples how it can look in action: https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics/wiki

For nim i like this one: https://github.com/johnnovak/illwill

It is immediate mode so you render the entire UI every tick, though it is smart enough to not actually redraw things that didn't change.

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

I like https://github.com/bpython/curtsies by @ballingt. It was used to implement bpython, one of the best python REPLs imo.

python prompt toolkit [0] and click [1] are used to create tools like pgcli [2], which is utterly wonderful.

[0]: https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit

[1]: https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x/

[2]: https://www.pgcli.com/

notcurses - https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

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.

I blogged about blessings here, also briefly comparing one of its capabilities - saving and restoring terminal state - to that of C's curses:

Blessings, curses-like Python library:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2012/08/blessings-curses-like-py...

I’ve often thought I’d like to spend some days writing ncurses interfaces in Guile.

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile-ncurses/

The documentation always inspired confidence. Sadly haven’t written anything more than hello world.

I haven't used it but since it hasn't been mentioned, I recalled that Visidata's rendering library vdtui.py could be used for these tasks. They say so in their readme

https://github.com/saulpw/visidata

I'm not really sure any TUI I've ever seen could really be classified as "good" but the one I like best is probably urwid (http://urwid.org/).

I'd to try out https://github.com/ggerganov/imtui Looks like a lot of fun.

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