Lanterna
notcurses
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Lanterna | notcurses | |
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19 | 102 | |
2,172 | 3,246 | |
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7.2 | 7.2 | |
19 days ago | 4 days ago | |
Java | C | |
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only | Apache License 2.0 |
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Lanterna
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Textual Web: TUIs for the Web
I wrote a TUI before for work, entirely of my own volition and for my own near-exclusive consumption (it was theoretically for anyone, but I'm the only person who would've had a reason to look at it - we were a fairly silo'd dev shop).
This is what made me pick TUI over a web UI:
* no web stack, period. no client/server. no js or html. this simplified the problem dramatically. also, no additional services to babysit.
* no browser - no certificates, security, auth, etc. It's just unix permissions and ssh.
* there's something comforting about the constraints of just ASCII/ANSI and curses. No bikeshedding over border widths or radii when it's just you picking among a few characters for the shape. just having less decisions to make speeds things up and helps you focus on what you actually want the UI to be able to do.
Obviously if your app is just calling APIs anyway, that might be negate some of these bullets about no additional services to babysit etc. In this case, it was running an internal infra app that directly connected to a pg db.
And what made me pick it over just having a CLI:
* discoverability - it was a complicated app and while it was all technically exposed via cli flags, having a GUI made it a lot easier to figure out what the right incantation is.
* richer communication medium that's back-and-forth instead of unidirectional. The TUI is able to fetch a list of e.g. valid IDs and let you pick them with a check-list, instead of you having to go query the db yourself and type them in.
I consider it one of my greatest victories that my boss was able to use the TUI to recover from an incident without needing to page me while I was on holiday, and he said he barely had to read the docs and felt confident he was getting it right the first time. "I did it while sipping my coffee."
I used https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna - would recommend. They even have a Swing-based emulation mode for easy development iteration running it from intelliJ.
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Textual: Rapid Application Development Framework for Python
This looks really cool.
In the past I used lanterna (https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna/tree/master) to develop a text UI for a critical process at the trading firm I worked at. It was essentially a process that would take updated market data and handle things that changed between the last trading session and today - like symbol renames (PCLN to BKNG), changes to market cap that make it change what "category" it fell into (they were based on market cap and volatility measures etc). Things of that nature, that the realtime system didn't handle but happened too often or were too hairy for us to just handle manually.
The system had a desktop UI component that was oriented towards use by our trading staff. We didn't really have notion of a "server UI" and the server was headless.
Nobody at our firm was a frontend developer, just backend, systems and data programmers who occasionally dabbled in frontend. So web UIs were very simplistic or highly specific to their use-case, we had no shared tooling.
In 2023 with things like create-react-app and whatever next.js does, I probably would've opted for one of those. I could've made another desktop app but I wanted to be able to easily get to this from a shitty ssh connection over tethered 4g when I was on-call. So X11 forwarding and RDP were out. So i looked around for a TUI-builder in the project's language, Java.
What i really liked about Lanterna was that it had a Swing-based implementation which meant I could easily run it from IntelliJ, and that would let me iterate rapidly, and then in production I could run it in a terminal via SSH directly on the machine the server was on (which had certain advantages).
I'll keep an eye on this to see if I can think of anything neat to build on it. I still generally don't like web apps because they feel like they take a lot of effort to get something compared to a functionally-equivalent product built in something non-browser-based like a TUI or desktop GUI.
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What options are there for making GUIs and other visual programs using java?
Just to differ what others already mentioned: Lanterna. Pretty retro GUIs just for fun.
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Library like Python Rich
Lanterna https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna Has examples for most of the things you're looking for (see links in https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna/blob/master/docs/contents.md)
- Nimwave – build TUIs for the terminal, web, and desktop
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Aquifer: GUI generator for command line apps
There is lanterna for that.
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Textual in Clojure?
You can use https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna
- Charm – tools to make the command line glamorous
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Lanterna VS FINAL CUT - a user suggested alternative
2 projects | 1 Jan 2022
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newt alternatives - S-Lang, termbox, and Lanterna
4 projects | 30 Dec 2021
notcurses
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Text UIs != Terminal UIs
> The only reason we don't have animation frameworks for the terminal is because it's not possible
- Notcurses: Blingful character graphics/TUI library
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good high-level ncurses library
Notcurses. Install it and run notcurses-demo to be suitably impressed.
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Ratatui: Build rich terminal user interfaces
Same for me, I would be much more motivated if there was something like textual for Rust. Given the capability of terminal emulators now I think Rust is lacking behind in the TUI field. Just checkout what can be done with something like notcurses
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Doom on Teletext
Other TUI libraries of note: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/doc/OT...
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Io Uring
The broader world probably knows him best for the terminal handling library Notcurses[1] and a lot of telling terminal emulator authors to get their shit together.
I’ve had his grad-school project libtorque[2] (HotPar ’10), an event-handling and scheduling library, on my to-read list for years, but I can’t seem to figure out how it accomplishes the interesting things it does.
[1] https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses, https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/
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Are We Sixel Yet
In XTerm, this (rightly) makes no difference. In Foot and Contour however, you still end up a line resp. a screen below where you started, if now with the correct horizontal position.
So it seems to me like what you want should work by default, except it doesn’t.
It should be possible to instead just treat the whole thing as a graphical overlay (by computing or directly asking for the character cell size, as Kirill Panov rightly admonishes me is possible with XTWINOPS) without touching the cursor; that’s what the “sixel scrolling” setting (DECSDM) is supposed to do. Then you can just manually move the cursor forward however many positions after you’re done drawing.
Except apparently the DEC manual (the VT330/340 one above) and DEC hardware contradict each other as to which setting of DECSDM (set or reset) corresponds to which scrolling state (enabled or disabled), and XTerm has implemented it according to the manual not the VT3xx[1,2,3]—then most other emulators followed suit[4]—then XTerm switched to following the hardware[5,6] (unless you and that’s what I’m seeing on my machine right now. So now you need to check if you’re on XTerm ≥ 369 or not[7]. If I’m reading the Notcurses code right, other terminals have followed suit[8].
Again, ouch.
P.S. It seems DEC had an internal doc for how their terminals should operate (DEC STD 070) [9]. It does not document DECSDM at all.
[1] https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/217#issuecomment-86449...
[2] https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/issues/41
[3] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1782
[4] https://github.com/arakiken/mlterm/pull/23
[5] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_369
[6] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h3-T...
[7] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/commit/0918fa251e2... (the correct version cutoff is 369 not 359, the patch contains a now-fixed bug)
[8] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/src/li... (look for mentions of invertsixel)
[9] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/standards/EL-SM070-00_DEC_S...
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smenu clean window effect
And there's also the notcurses library:
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baca: TUI ebook reader
notcurses
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Sharing Saturday #453
Once I have finished documenting all of the existing API functions and structs, I will begin work on terminal rendering. While the API surface area will only be slightly increased (a single function to set some flags) the actual work will mean building a parallel renderer for both Linux and Windows. I will be looking into notcurses to see if it can make my life easier in this regard.
What are some alternatives?
rich - Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal.
FTXUI - Features: - Functional style. Inspired by [1] and React - Simple and elegant syntax (in my opinion). - Support for UTF8 and fullwidth chars (→ 测试). - No dependencies. - Cross platform. Linux/mac (main target), Windows (experimental thanks to contributors), - WebAssembly. - Keyboard & mouse navigation. Operating systems: - linux emscripten - linux gcc - linux clang - windows msvc - mac clang
CQEngine - Ultra-fast SQL-like queries on Java collections
xterm.js - A terminal for the web
sixvid - Simple script for animated GIF viewing using sixels
tcell - Tcell is an alternate terminal package, similar in some ways to termbox, but better in others.
Modern Java - A Guide to Java 8 - Modern Java - A Guide to Java 8
jcurses - Java Curses implementation
awesome-tuis - List of projects that provide terminal user interfaces
LightAdmin - [PoC] Pluggable CRUD UI library for Java web applications
python-prompt-toolkit - Library for building powerful interactive command line applications in Python
sixel-tmux - sixel-tmux is a fork of tmux, with just one goal: having the most reliable support of graphics