Lanterna VS notcurses

Compare Lanterna vs notcurses and see what are their differences.

Lanterna

Java library for creating text-based GUIs (by mabe02)

notcurses

blingful character graphics/TUI library. definitely not curses. (by dankamongmen)
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Lanterna notcurses
19 102
2,172 3,246
- -
7.2 7.2
19 days ago 4 days ago
Java C
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Lanterna

Posts with mentions or reviews of Lanterna. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-07.
  • Textual Web: TUIs for the Web
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2023
    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.

  • Textual: Rapid Application Development Framework for Python
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Aug 2023
    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.

  • What options are there for making GUIs and other visual programs using java?
    2 projects | /r/java | 4 May 2023
    Just to differ what others already mentioned: Lanterna. Pretty retro GUIs just for fun.
  • Library like Python Rich
    2 projects | /r/javahelp | 27 Sep 2022
    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
    2 projects | /r/commandline | 18 Jun 2022
  • Aquifer: GUI generator for command line apps
    2 projects | /r/java | 6 May 2022
    There is lanterna for that.
  • Textual in Clojure?
    9 projects | /r/Clojure | 28 Apr 2022
    You can use https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna
  • Charm – tools to make the command line glamorous
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2022
  • Lanterna VS FINAL CUT - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 1 Jan 2022
  • newt alternatives - S-Lang, termbox, and Lanterna
    4 projects | 30 Dec 2021

notcurses

Posts with mentions or reviews of notcurses. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-02.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Lanterna and notcurses you can also consider the following projects:

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