Open-source alternatives to Notcurses

FTXUI is a C++ terminal user interface library and cross-platform console framework used for building interactive command line applications. It functions as a declarative terminal layout engine and a component-based UI toolkit that enables the creation of responsive interfaces. The library is distinguished by its terminal graphics and animation capabilities, allowing for the rendering of custom shapes, data plots, and smooth visual transitions using easing functions. It provides a comprehensive set of interactive widgets and a layout system utilizing flexbox and grid containers that adapt to

gocui is a console user interface library for the Go programming language. It provides a toolkit for building interactive terminal applications using a layout engine that organizes overlapping rectangular views and coordinates. The library features a terminal input handler to capture and map keyboard shortcuts and mouse events to specific application actions. It includes an ANSI escape sequence parser to manage text attributes, colors, and cursor positioning. The framework covers interface view management and overlapping window layering, allowing for a structured arrangement of content. Rend

Bubbles is a terminal user interface toolkit and component library providing a set of pre-built, reusable widgets for creating interactive command-line applications. It functions as a framework for building complex tools that require real-time updates and keyboard navigation. The library includes a variety of specialized interface elements such as fuzzy-filterable item lists, single-line and multi-line text inputs, and tabular data grids. It also provides visual feedback components including animated loading spinners, progress meters, countdown timers, and stopwatches. Additional capabilitie

This project is a Python terminal user interface library and toolkit designed for building interactive command-line applications. It provides a terminal input manager and a widget toolkit for rendering dashboards, menus, and editors within a terminal emulator. The library enables the creation of full-screen terminal interfaces and interactive shells. It distinguishes itself with advanced input handling, including lexer-based syntax highlighting for visual feedback on code structure and support for industry-standard keyboard navigation modes such as Emacs and Vi. The capability surface covers

Terminal.Gui is a cross-platform .NET toolkit for building interactive text-based user interfaces. It provides a component-based architecture, a terminal rendering engine, and a declarative layout system to create console applications that run consistently across Windows, macOS, and Linux. The framework distinguishes itself with a comprehensive set of interactive console widgets, including data grids, hex editors, and hierarchical tree components. It supports advanced visual capabilities such as 24-bit True Color, Sixel image support, and a relative-coordinate layout system that adapts to ter

Terminal-kit is a Node.js toolkit for building command-line applications and console user interfaces. It provides a comprehensive suite of utilities for console text styling, terminal graphics rendering, input parsing, and interactive interface construction. The library features a cell-based text grid model, a component document tree for hierarchical layout of interactive widgets, and off-screen pixel buffering for multi-layered image composition and manipulation. It handles direct escape-sequence output control and raw-mode input parsing to manage display regions and capture user interaction

This project is a terminal user interface library for Node.js, designed to facilitate the construction of interactive command-line applications. It provides a comprehensive toolkit of high-level widgets that abstract complex terminal escape codes and rendering logic, allowing developers to build functional interfaces using reusable components. The framework distinguishes itself by implementing a box-model-based layout engine and a virtual DOM-style reconciliation system. These mechanisms enable responsive design patterns—such as percentage-based sizing and relative positioning—to function wit

tui-rs is a Rust framework for building rich terminal user interfaces and dashboards. It provides a terminal layout engine for dividing the screen into flexible rectangular regions and a widget library for rendering data in a terminal. The project includes a cross-platform terminal backend abstraction layer to ensure consistent rendering and compatibility across different operating system terminal drivers. The framework covers a wide range of UI components, including data visualization tools such as charts, progress gauges, and sparklines, as well as structural elements like data tables, ite

term.everything is a terminal-based graphical compositor and renderer that converts framebuffers into ANSI escape sequences to display GUI applications within a terminal emulator. It functions as a remote GUI streamer and framebuffer-to-ANSI converter, allowing for the visualization of headless systems and the execution of graphical software over SSH connections. The project includes a specialized mouse input handler that utilizes SGR 1006 reporting to capture movements and clicks, enabling user interaction with rendered graphical interfaces. It emulates a compositor to coordinate window beha

Kitty is a high-performance, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator designed to provide a consistent and extensible workspace across different operating systems. It leverages graphics hardware to render text, images, and complex layouts with low latency, while providing a robust environment for demanding command-line workflows. The project distinguishes itself through its integrated workspace management and programmable interface. It functions as a tiling window manager that organizes terminal windows, tabs, and layouts into persistent, keyboard-driven sessions. Users can automate complex workflow

blessed-contrib is a terminal user interface framework and a Node.js console widget library designed for building data-driven command line interfaces. It serves as an ASCII data visualization toolkit and a dashboard framework for organizing grid-based layouts and interactive elements within a console. The project provides a collection of reusable terminal components, including a command line image renderer and tools for text-based graphic rendering. It specifically enables the creation of terminal dashboards through a system for positioning multiple widgets across rows and columns and a mecha

Asciimatics is a cross-platform terminal user interface framework and console wrapper. It functions as a curses-compatible library providing a toolkit for building interactive text-based applications, an ASCII art generator, and a terminal animation engine. The project distinguishes itself through a visual effects engine capable of rendering sprites, particle systems, and anti-aliased lines. It includes specialized systems for creating moving text-based graphics and tools for converting image files into character-based representations. The framework covers core terminal management including

This project is a framework for building interactive, graphical-style terminal applications. It provides a declarative component model that organizes user interfaces into a tree of nested widgets, each managing its own lifecycle, state, and rendering. By subclassing the base application class, developers can construct complex, keyboard-navigable interfaces that run directly within terminal emulators. The framework distinguishes itself through a reactive architecture and a CSS-based layout engine. It uses a reactive attribute system to automatically track state changes and trigger targeted int

Sampler is a shell command monitoring tool and terminal-based metrics dashboard. It functions as a YAML-configured shell orchestrator that executes commands at set intervals to collect data and monitor system metrics. The tool distinguishes itself by rendering real-time shell output as terminal widgets, such as sparklines, gauges, bar charts, and run charts. It also includes a conditional alerting system that triggers audio notifications, visual alerts, or secondary shell commands when sampled output matches predefined data conditions. The project covers broad capability areas including shel

usql is a universal SQL command-line interface used to connect to and manage multiple SQL and NoSQL databases through a single unified tool. It provides a standardized interface for executing queries across various data stores and serves as a multi-database query tool and schema inspector. The tool distinguishes itself by enabling cross-database data migration, allowing users to pipe result sets from one active database connection directly into another. It also features terminal-based data visualization, which renders query results as graphical charts, graphs, and images directly within the t

Cursive is a cross-platform terminal user interface toolkit and framework for building interactive applications in Rust. It provides a modular system for creating text-based graphical interfaces, utilizing a dedicated engine to manage the main display loop and view hierarchies. The toolkit features a backend-agnostic abstraction layer to ensure consistent rendering and input handling across different operating systems. It distinguishes itself through a palette-based theme engine that supports runtime theme loading and true color rendering, as well as the ability to generate user interface hie

xterm.js is a high-performance terminal emulator library designed for web applications. It provides a core rendering engine and a modular interface that allows developers to embed fully functional, interactive command-line interfaces directly into browser environments. By processing standard terminal data streams and managing internal buffer states, the library enables the creation of rich, text-based user interfaces that support standard terminal protocols. The project distinguishes itself through a highly extensible architecture that allows for deep customization of terminal behavior. Devel

Spectre.Console is a .NET framework designed for building structured, feature-rich command-line applications. It provides a comprehensive toolkit for managing complex command hierarchies, type-safe argument parsing, and dependency injection, allowing developers to decouple business logic from input processing while maintaining modular application designs. The framework distinguishes itself through a sophisticated terminal user interface toolkit that enables the creation of dynamic, interactive console experiences. It utilizes a markup-based rendering system to display styled text, tables, cha

This project is a framework for building stateful, component-driven terminal user interfaces in Rust. It provides a structured architecture for managing complex command line applications by decoupling rendering logic from application state through a centralized message-passing system. By utilizing a component-based model, it enables developers to construct interactive interfaces that handle event routing, focus management, and lifecycle orchestration in a predictable manner. The framework distinguishes itself through its focus on modularity and developer productivity. It employs trait-based c

Termui is a Go terminal user interface library used for building interactive dashboards and visual layouts within a command-line environment. It functions as a TUI layout engine, an interactive CLI framework, and a terminal data visualization toolkit. The library provides a set of specialized widgets for rendering charts, plots, gauges, and tables using character-based graphics. It includes a grid-based system for arranging interface elements using relative coordinates and proportional sizing to create structured displays. The toolkit covers a broad range of capabilities including data visua

Fortio is a performance testing tool written in Go that generates constant request rates to measure latency histograms and response percentiles. It functions as a network performance benchmarker for analyzing system performance across HTTP and gRPC endpoints, and includes a specialized HTTP echo server for mirroring requests. The project distinguishes itself through a web-based HTTP load testing API used for triggering asynchronous tests and visualizing result data through graphs. It also provides server behavior simulation, allowing the echo server to inject artificial delays and vary respon

ytfzf is a command-line media launcher and video browser that allows users to search, filter, and launch video content directly from the terminal. It functions as a terminal-based search client that leverages fuzzy selection to navigate video results without the use of a web browser. The system is distinguished by its ability to perform platform-agnostic video searches without requiring external API keys. It includes a terminal thumbnail viewer that renders video previews using terminal-based image protocols and supports the integration of custom scrapers and addons via a script-based plugin

Urho3D is a cross-platform 3D game engine written in C++. It uses a component-based scene graph to compose game objects from nodes and attached components, separating transforms from behaviors for modular design. The engine integrates AngelScript and Lua scripting for game logic, uses the Bullet library for physics simulation, and renders scenes with OpenGL or Direct3D through forward, deferred, or light pre-pass pipelines with customizable render passes and shadow mapping. The engine distinguishes itself with a built-in visual scene and UI editor for composing 3D worlds and interface layouts

Chafa is a terminal graphics library that converts images and animated GIFs into character art for display in terminal emulators. It supports multiple output formats including ANSI escape sequences, Sixel graphics, and Unicode block characters, making it a versatile tool for rendering images directly within the terminal environment. The library is built as a shared C library with official bindings for Python and JavaScript, allowing developers to integrate terminal image rendering capabilities into applications across different programming environments. Chafa handles the full pipeline from im

Mosaic is a declarative terminal user interface framework and display engine. It provides a toolkit for building interactive command-line applications by synchronizing a data model with the terminal screen to minimize manual redraws. The library functions as a layout engine for designing structured visual interfaces and real-time displays. It enables the development of interactive console programs, such as system monitors and games, by managing responsive user input and dynamic output updates.

Crossterm is a cross-platform Rust library for terminal manipulation, providing a low-level interface for controlling terminal state, cursor movement, and text styling. It acts as a cross-platform TTY interface that handles raw mode, alternate screen buffers, and terminal window metadata across different operating systems. The library includes an ANSI text styling engine for applying RGB colors and text attributes to console output, as well as a terminal input event handler for capturing keyboard presses, mouse movements, and terminal resize events in real time. It also provides system clipbo

Skim is a cross-platform interactive fuzzy finder that runs as a terminal application, a Rust library, a Vim and Neovim plugin, and a shell integration tool. It provides real-time filtering and selection from lists of items, supporting keyboard and mouse navigation, live preview panes, and multi-select functionality across Linux, macOS, and Windows. The tool distinguishes itself through a composable query expression tree that supports fuzzy, exact, inverse, prefix, suffix, and logical AND/OR operators, combined with a Smith-Waterman scoring engine that penalizes typos and gaps for natural rel