notcurses VS blessed

> The only reason we don't have animation frameworks for the terminal is because it's not possible

https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses

Notcurses. Install it and run notcurses-demo to be suitably impressed.

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

On the application side of rendering, see notcurses, it is at the leading edge: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

Other TUI libraries of note: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/doc/OT...

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/

[2] https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Libtorque

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...

And there's also the notcurses library:

I found blessed but it seems like it was last updated 8 years ago. So what are my options?

So far I found this library github.com/chjj/blessed which is very powerful, I need to render animated charts and other complex objects and for my purpose it is doing well.

Alas https://github.com/chjj/blessed/issues/418#issuecomment-1533...

I considered blessed for a recent project, but ended up just simplifying the approach & making do with Inquirer + Meow instead due to the maintenance status. Haven't found anything else equivalent to blessed, other than Ink.

Inquirer is still probably the library that is most similar, if you are looking for comparisons to existing tools. My goal was to create a set of tools that uses the terminal window for a single operation at a time. The UI providing as much contextual information as possible to the user to know what actions they can perform, and any relevant information. A bit like a "choose your adventure" via terminal app sort of thing. Explicitly trying to stay clear of full screen and dashboard type stuff, like what blessed provides.

Not exactly a shell scripting framework, but y’all should check out blessed js. Weirdly enough I just found it yesterday and shit goes absolutely wild in the terminal

Perhaps you’d like a terminal based UI? https://github.com/chjj/blessed

You can build them from scratch, or use one of many specialized libraries on NPM, like commander, yargs, blessed, terminal kit, prompts, and many more.

This is where libraries come in: https://github.com/chjj/blessed - this allows you to manage rendering in the terminal on your own, so you can have a scrolling box of text at the top and a "command line" at the bottom.

I was hoping to write my app in Rust as a learning exercise, but my alternative is https://www.npmjs.com/package/blessed, which is NodeJS. Ah well.

Using this https://github.com/chjj/blessed