gdamore/tcell
Tcell
tcell is a Go terminal user interface library and framework for building cell-based applications. It functions as a terminal emulator backend and input processor, utilizing a change-based diffing engine to manage screen state and efficiently render updates.
The project is distinguished by its pluggable backend abstraction, which allows terminal interfaces to be rendered across physical terminals or compiled into WebAssembly for web browser display. It provides a virtual screen simulation to enable programmatic event injection and output inspection for automated application testing.
Its capability surface covers wide-ranging terminal management, including terminfo-based capability detection, Unicode and grapheme-aware text rendering, and the normalization of keyboard and mouse events. The library handles low-level TTY device access, RGB color management, and the processing of bracketed paste sequences.
Features
- Terminal Rendering Engines - Provides a terminal rendering engine that maps application state to visual interfaces with support for wide and combining characters.
- Terminal User Interfaces - Provides a comprehensive framework for building interactive, cell-based text user interfaces in the Go language.
- Keyboard and Mouse Event Capture - Monitors mouse movements and clicks to track cursor position and interaction state.
- Terminal Input Handlers - Processes and normalizes raw keyboard, mouse, and clipboard events across different terminal environments.
- Cell-Based Grid Renderers - Implements a cell-based grid renderer that controls the content and styling of individual characters for custom layouts.
- Emulation Backends - Acts as a pluggable emulation backend handling low-level IO, terminfo detection, and raw mode management.
- String Width Calculators - Calculates the visual length of strings by accounting for mixed-width characters and non-printing escape sequences.
- Event Normalization - Translates raw terminal byte streams into a unified internal format for consistent keyboard and mouse events.
- Pluggable Backends - Provides a pluggable backend architecture to support physical terminals, simulated screens, and WebAssembly targets.
- Character Encoding Support - Ensures correct rendering of diverse character sets by converting text between various Unicode locales.
- Cross-Platform TUI Frameworks - Offers a cross-platform TUI framework for managing terminal state and layouts across operating systems and web browsers.
- Diffing-Based State Updates - Calculates differences between current and previous screen states to perform granular terminal updates.
- Modifier Key Listeners - Reports modifier keys such as ALT and CTRL alongside base keys for consistent event handling.
- Keyboard Input Listeners - Detects keyboard key presses, including virtual codes and physical locations, to handle user interactions.
- Go TUI Libraries - Provides a specialized library for creating text-based user interfaces specifically for the Go programming language.
- Terminal Grid Cell Stores - Implements a two-dimensional grid of character cells with styling and dirty-state tracking for efficient updates.
- Input Normalization Utilities - Normalizes mouse button reporting across different operating systems to ensure consistent event identification.
- Coordinate-Based Content Placement - Provides the ability to print strings and characters at precise coordinates using custom styles to build visual interfaces.
- Terminal Input Handling - Processes and normalizes keyboard and mouse events specifically within a terminal emulator environment.
- Terminal Device Handles - Provides low-level acquisition of terminal device handles to control screen output and process input events.
- Double-Width Character Alignment - Handles the visual width calculation and alignment of Unicode characters that occupy two columns in the terminal grid.
- Unicode and Color Output Renderers - Renders Unicode text with wide characters and locale conversion to ensure consistent visual output.
- User Input Processing - Processes keyboard presses and modifier keys through an asynchronous event queue for user interaction.
- User Interaction Handling - Captures keyboard and mouse input events to trigger application actions based on physical interaction.
- Terminal Resize Detectors - Detects changes in terminal window dimensions and provides updated width and height to the application.
- File and Console I/O - Controls raw mode and handles input and output streams to create interactive user interfaces.
- Terminal Emulator Configuration - Allows overriding automatic capability negotiation for keyboard protocols and mouse reporting for non-standard emulators.
- Terminal Feature Negotiation - Negotiates terminal features automatically or via overrides to ensure consistent behavior across different emulators.
- Terminal Capability Detectors - Parses and expands terminfo database strings to determine supported features without hard-coding escape sequences.
- Terminal Screen Simulators - Provides a programmable in-memory terminal screen to inject events and inspect output for automated testing.
- Cell Content Retrievers - Allows retrieval of the character, style, and display width at specific coordinates to inspect rendered content.
- Terminal Cursor Controllers - Provides programmatic control over cursor positioning and visibility using standard terminal escape sequences.
- Event Handling Systems - Implements an event-handling architecture to process user input and system signals to determine event consumption.
- State Redraw Loops - Triggers screen refreshes by sending wakeup events to the event loop based on state changes.
- RGB Color Mapping - Translates RGB color values into compatible terminal color sequences based on the emulator's capabilities.
- Terminal Compatibility Layers - Ensures consistent visual rendering across diverse terminal emulators by managing character encodings and capabilities.
- Terminal Layout Configurations - Adjusts terminal dimensions to fit containers or sets specific row and column counts.
- Terminal Text Coloring - Applies foreground and background colors to text via ANSI codes to display content at specific screen coordinates.
- Terminal Text Attributes - Provides ANSI terminal attributes such as bold and italic to control the visual appearance of text.
- True Color Support - Enables 24-bit true color rendering and color map application based on the terminal environment.
- Terminfo-Based Detections - Uses the terminfo database to automatically detect supported colors, mouse protocols, and keyboard features.
- Terminal Environment Initializers - Sets up initial terminal values and file descriptors to ensure screen states can be restored upon termination.
- WebAssembly Terminal Renderers - Compiles terminal interfaces into WebAssembly for embedding and rendering within web browsers.
- Command Line Tools - Terminal handling library.
- Terminal Libraries - Go library for building terminal-based user interfaces.
- TUI Libraries - Go terminal rendering package.
