Lanterna VS tcell

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.

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.

Just to differ what others already mentioned: Lanterna. Pretty retro GUIs just for fun.

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)

You can use a library such as https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna to do fancy console printing. You could even do full console UIs, but just printing lines and moving the cursor and so on is also possible I think.

There is lanterna for that.

You can use https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna

Is this just a personal excercise? Because https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna is pretty much what you're talking about and pretty good.

https://github.com/gdamore/tcell s, err := tcell.NewScreen() // Clear screen s.Clear()

I have used https://github.com/gdamore/tcell/ for github.com/raff/gio-games/arrows (look at game_term.go that is the terminal version, alternative to the gio/graphical version)

Hi im using linux (distro: Fedora 37) and I dont i have problems with installing go modules. When i run the commands in terminal (bash) "go install github.com/gdamore/tcell/v2" it gives me this error: "go: 'go install' requires a version when current directory is not in a module Try 'go install github.com/gdamore/tcell/v2@latest' to install the latest version" So when I run the command: "go install github.com/gdamore/tcell/vs@latest" I get this error: "package github.com/gdamore/tcell/v2 is not a main package". Please someone help.

Hi guys, I have fixed the problem. The problem was as stated: remove terminal behavior like when a key is pressed and held it does not work as needed. For example if I want to move character when user press key the player (character) will move one step then stops then move fast like text curser. The solution is not by using [Console Screen Buffer] the Tcell is enough, But the problem is caused by the way the input is read from the user as u/pekim says in comments it is a "Typical behaviour in most environments (not just Windows)". So to fix this you need to use windows API (w32) and read key using GetAsyncKeyState() that will fix the problem.

There's quite a variety of tui libraries in Go with all kinds of different tradeoffs. Likely you won't find one that does just exactly what you want (paren matching support seems particularly unlikely out of the box, dunno if you'll find something you can plug in). tview and the underlying, lower-level tcell may be useful. I see termbox mentioned a lot here though that looks more like a toolbox for building such things than a solution itself.

There's also tcell

How about some libraries that help with building TUIs?

I'll start with https://github.com/gdamore/tcell

(notcurses is the first in C, and currently best globally. The first in Rust might be tui-rs. The first in Go might be tcell.)

a Snake Game implication in Go using 2d array. https://github.com/twiny/snaky it runs on terminal window using github.com/gdamore/tcell/v2/termbox to render Snake movement.