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Tcell is an alternate terminal package, similar in some ways to termbox, but better in others.

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Quick Overview

Tcell is a Go package that provides a low-level, terminal-independent library for creating text-based user interfaces. It offers a cross-platform solution for building terminal applications with advanced features like color support, mouse input, and Unicode handling.

Pros

  • Cross-platform compatibility (works on Windows, macOS, and Linux)
  • Rich feature set including color support, mouse input, and Unicode handling
  • Efficient and low-level API for fine-grained control
  • Active development and community support

Cons

  • Steeper learning curve compared to higher-level TUI libraries
  • Requires more code to implement complex UI elements
  • Limited built-in widgets or pre-made components
  • Documentation could be more comprehensive for beginners

Code Examples

  1. Basic screen initialization and event handling:
package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "os"

    "github.com/gdamore/tcell/v2"
)

func main() {
    screen, err := tcell.NewScreen()
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "%v\n", err)
        os.Exit(1)
    }
    if err := screen.Init(); err != nil {
        fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "%v\n", err)
        os.Exit(1)
    }
    defer screen.Fini()

    for {
        switch ev := screen.PollEvent().(type) {
        case *tcell.EventKey:
            if ev.Key() == tcell.KeyEscape {
                return
            }
        }
    }
}
  1. Drawing text on the screen:
screen.Clear()
style := tcell.StyleDefault.Foreground(tcell.ColorRed).Background(tcell.ColorBlack)
row, col := 1, 1
str := "Hello, Tcell!"
for _, r := range str {
    screen.SetContent(col, row, r, nil, style)
    col++
}
screen.Show()
  1. Handling mouse events:
switch ev := screen.PollEvent().(type) {
case *tcell.EventMouse:
    x, y := ev.Position()
    button := ev.Buttons()
    if button == tcell.ButtonPrimary {
        fmt.Printf("Left click at (%d, %d)\n", x, y)
    }
}

Getting Started

To use Tcell in your Go project, follow these steps:

  1. Install Tcell:

    go get -u github.com/gdamore/tcell/v2

  2. Import Tcell in your Go file:

    import "github.com/gdamore/tcell/v2"

  3. Initialize a screen:

    screen, err := tcell.NewScreen()
if err != nil {
    // Handle error
}
if err := screen.Init(); err != nil {
    // Handle error
}
defer screen.Fini()

  4. Start handling events and drawing to the screen using the examples provided above.

Competitor Comparisons

nsf logo

termbox-go

4,667

Pure Go termbox implementation

Pros of termbox-go

  • Simpler API, easier to get started for beginners
  • Lightweight with minimal dependencies
  • Good performance for basic terminal applications

Cons of termbox-go

  • Limited color support (16 colors)
  • Lacks advanced features like mouse support and true color
  • Less actively maintained compared to tcell

Code Comparison

termbox-go:

err := termbox.Init()
defer termbox.Close()

termbox.SetCell(x, y, ch, fg, bg)
termbox.Flush()

tcell:

screen, err := tcell.NewScreen()
screen.Init()
defer screen.Fini()

screen.SetContent(x, y, ch, nil, tcell.StyleDefault)
screen.Show()

Both libraries provide similar basic functionality for terminal manipulation, but tcell offers more advanced features and better maintainability. termbox-go is simpler to use and may be sufficient for basic terminal applications, while tcell is more suitable for complex projects requiring advanced terminal capabilities.

tcell has better color support, including true color, and offers additional features like mouse input handling. It also has more active development and a larger community. However, termbox-go's simplicity can be advantageous for smaller projects or developers new to terminal programming in Go.

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tview

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Terminal UI library with rich, interactive widgets — written in Golang

Pros of tview

  • Higher-level abstraction, providing ready-to-use UI components
  • Easier to create complex terminal user interfaces quickly
  • Built-in support for themes and styles

Cons of tview

  • Less flexible for custom low-level terminal manipulations
  • Potentially higher memory footprint due to additional abstractions
  • May have a steeper learning curve for developers familiar with lower-level APIs

Code Comparison

tview example:

app := tview.NewApplication()
box := tview.NewBox().SetBorder(true).SetTitle("Hello, world!")
if err := app.SetRoot(box, true).Run(); err != nil {
    panic(err)
}

tcell example:

s, _ := tcell.NewScreen()
s.Init()
s.SetContent(10, 10, 'H', nil, tcell.StyleDefault)
s.Show()
for {
    ev := s.PollEvent()
    // Handle events
}

tview builds on top of tcell, providing a higher-level API for creating terminal user interfaces. While tcell offers more fine-grained control over terminal operations, tview simplifies the process of building complex UIs with pre-built components. The choice between the two depends on the specific requirements of your project and the level of abstraction you prefer.

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termui

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Golang terminal dashboard

Pros of termui

  • Higher-level abstraction for building terminal UIs
  • Provides pre-built widgets and components
  • Easier to create complex layouts and dashboards

Cons of termui

  • Less flexible for custom terminal manipulation
  • Potentially higher resource usage due to abstraction layer
  • May have limitations for certain advanced use cases

Code Comparison

termui example:

ui.Init()
p := widgets.NewParagraph()
p.Text = "Hello World!"
ui.Render(p)

tcell example:

s, _ := tcell.NewScreen()
s.Init()
s.SetContent(0, 0, 'H', nil, tcell.StyleDefault)
s.Show()

Summary

termui is better suited for quickly building terminal-based user interfaces with pre-built components, while tcell provides lower-level control over terminal operations. termui offers a more straightforward approach for creating dashboards and complex layouts, but may be less flexible for custom terminal manipulations. tcell, on the other hand, gives developers finer control over terminal interactions but requires more code to achieve similar results to termui's built-in widgets.

jroimartin logo

gocui

9,886

Minimalist Go package aimed at creating Console User Interfaces.

Pros of gocui

  • Higher-level abstraction for creating text-based user interfaces
  • Built-in support for widgets like views and keybindings
  • Easier to create complex layouts and manage multiple views

Cons of gocui

  • Less flexible for low-level terminal manipulation
  • May have higher overhead for simpler applications
  • Smaller community and fewer updates compared to tcell

Code Comparison

gocui example:

g, err := gocui.NewGui(gocui.OutputNormal)
if err != nil {
    log.Panicln(err)
}
defer g.Close()

g.SetManagerFunc(layout)

tcell example:

s, err := tcell.NewScreen()
if err != nil {
    log.Fatalf("%+v", err)
}
if err := s.Init(); err != nil {
    log.Fatalf("%+v", err)
}

gocui provides a higher-level API for creating and managing views, while tcell offers more direct control over the terminal screen. gocui is better suited for complex TUI applications, whereas tcell is more appropriate for applications requiring fine-grained control over terminal output and input handling.

marcusolsson logo

tui-go

2,093

A UI library for terminal applications.

Pros of tui-go

  • Higher-level abstraction for building TUIs, with built-in widgets and layouts
  • Easier to create complex user interfaces with less code
  • Better suited for developers who want a quick start in building TUIs

Cons of tui-go

  • Less flexible and customizable compared to tcell's lower-level approach
  • Smaller community and fewer resources available
  • Not actively maintained (last commit in 2019)

Code Comparison

tui-go example:

box := tui.NewVBox(
    tui.NewLabel("Hello, world!"),
    tui.NewLabel("Press q to quit."),
)
ui, err := tui.New(box)
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

tcell example:

s, err := tcell.NewScreen()
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
s.Init()
s.SetContent(0, 0, 'H', nil, tcell.StyleDefault)
s.SetContent(1, 0, 'i', nil, tcell.StyleDefault)

tui-go provides a higher-level API with pre-built widgets, making it easier to create complex UIs quickly. tcell offers a lower-level API, giving more control over individual cells and allowing for more customization. tcell is actively maintained and has a larger community, while tui-go hasn't been updated since 2019. Developers should choose based on their specific needs and desired level of control over the TUI.

mum4k logo

termdash

2,710

Terminal based dashboard.

Pros of termdash

  • Higher-level abstraction for building terminal dashboards
  • Rich set of pre-built widgets (charts, gauges, sparklines, etc.)
  • Built-in layout management system

Cons of termdash

  • More opinionated and less flexible than tcell
  • Steeper learning curve for simple use cases
  • Potentially higher resource usage due to abstraction layers

Code Comparison

termdash:

container, err := container.New(t, container.Border(linestyle.Light))
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}
text, err := newTextWidget()
container.Update("textWidget", text)

tcell:

s, err := tcell.NewScreen()
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
s.Init()
s.SetStyle(tcell.StyleDefault.
    Foreground(tcell.ColorBlack).
    Background(tcell.ColorWhite))

termdash is built on top of tcell and provides a higher-level API for creating terminal user interfaces. It offers pre-built widgets and layout management, making it easier to create complex dashboards. However, this comes at the cost of flexibility and a steeper learning curve.

tcell, on the other hand, is a lower-level library that provides direct control over the terminal. It's more flexible and lightweight but requires more code to create complex interfaces. tcell is better suited for simpler applications or when you need fine-grained control over the terminal output.

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README

Tcell

Tcell is a Go package that provides a cell based view for text terminals, like XTerm. It was inspired by termbox, but includes many additional improvements.

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NOTE: This is version 2 of Tcell. There are breaking changes relative to version 1. Version 1.x remains available using the import github.com/gdamore/tcell.

Tutorial

A brief, and still somewhat rough, tutorial is available.

Examples

  • proxima5 - space shooter (video)
  • govisor - service management UI (screenshot)
  • mouse demo - included mouse test (screenshot)
  • gomatrix - converted from Termbox
  • micro - lightweight text editor with syntax-highlighting and themes
  • godu - utility to discover large files/folders
  • tview - rich interactive widgets
  • cview - user interface toolkit (fork of tview)
  • awsome gocui - Go Console User Interface
  • gomandelbrot - Mandelbrot!
  • WTF - personal information dashboard
  • browsh - modern web browser (video)
  • go-life - Conway's Game of Life
  • gowid - compositional widgets for terminal UIs, inspired by urwid
  • termshark - interface for tshark, inspired by Wireshark, built on gowid
  • go-tetris - Go Tetris with AI option
  • fzf - command-line fuzzy finder
  • ascii-fluid - fluid simulation controlled by webcam
  • cbind - key event encoding, decoding and handling
  • tpong - old-school Pong
  • aerc - email client
  • tblogs - development blogs reader
  • spinc - irssi inspired chat application for Cisco Spark/WebEx
  • gorss - RSS/Atom feed reader
  • memoryalike - memorization game
  • lf - file manager
  • goful - CUI file manager
  • gokeybr - deliberately practice your typing
  • gonano - editor, mimics nano
  • uchess - UCI chess client
  • min - Gemini browser
  • ov - file pager
  • tmux-wormhole - tmux plugin to transfer files
  • gruid-tcell - driver for the grid based UI and game framework
  • aretext - minimalist text editor with vim key bindings
  • sync - GitHub repo synchronization tool
  • statusbar - statusbar motivation tool for tracking periodic tasks/goals
  • todo - simple todo app
  • gosnakego - a snake game
  • gbb - A classical bulletin board app for tildes or public unix servers
  • lil - A simple and flexible interface for any service by implementing only list and get operations
  • hero.go - 2d monster shooter (video)
  • go-tetris - simple tetris game for native terminal and WASM using github actions+pages

Pure Go Terminfo Database

Tcell includes a full parser and expander for terminfo capability strings, so that it can avoid hard coding escape strings for formatting. It also favors portability, and includes support for all POSIX systems.

The database is also flexible & extensible, and can be modified by either running a program to build the entire database, or an entry for just a single terminal.

More Portable

Tcell is portable to a wide variety of systems, and is pure Go, without any need for CGO. Tcell is believed to work with mainstream systems officially supported by golang.

No Async IO

Tcell is able to operate without requiring SIGIO signals (unlike termbox), or asynchronous I/O, and can instead use standard Go file objects and Go routines. This means it should be safe, especially for use with programs that use exec, or otherwise need to manipulate the tty streams. This model is also much closer to idiomatic Go, leading to fewer surprises.

Rich Unicode & non-Unicode support

Tcell includes enhanced support for Unicode, including wide characters and combining characters, provided your terminal can support them. Note that Windows terminals generally don't support the full Unicode repertoire.

It will also convert to and from Unicode locales, so that the program can work with UTF-8 internally, and get reasonable output in other locales. Tcell tries hard to convert to native characters on both input and output. On output Tcell even makes use of the alternate character set to facilitate drawing certain characters.

More Function Keys

Tcell also has richer support for a larger number of special keys that some terminals can send.

Better Color Handling

Tcell will respect your terminal's color space as specified within your terminfo entries. For example attempts to emit color sequences on VT100 terminals won't result in unintended consequences.

In legacy Windows mode, Tcell supports 16 colors, bold, dim, and reverse, instead of just termbox's 8 colors with reverse. (Note that there is some conflation with bold/dim and colors.) Modern Windows 10 can benefit from much richer colors however.

Tcell maps 16 colors down to 8, for terminals that need it. (The upper 8 colors are just brighter versions of the lower 8.)

Better Mouse Support

Tcell supports enhanced mouse tracking mode, so your application can receive regular mouse motion events, and wheel events, if your terminal supports it.

(Note: The Windows 10 Terminal application suffers from a flaw in this regard, and does not support mouse interaction. The stock Windows 10 console host fired up with cmd.exe or PowerShell works fine however.)

Termbox Compatibility

A compatibility layer for termbox is provided in the compat directory. To use it, try importing github.com/gdamore/tcell/termbox instead. Most termbox-go programs will probably work without further modification.

Working With Unicode

Internally Tcell uses UTF-8, just like Go. However, Tcell understands how to convert to and from other character sets, using the capabilities of the golang.org/x/text/encoding packages. Your application must supply them, as the full set of the most common ones bloats the program by about 2 MB. If you're lazy, and want them all anyway, see the encoding sub-directory.

Wide & Combining Characters

The SetContent() API takes a primary rune, and an optional list of combining runes. If any of the runes is a wide (East Asian) rune occupying two cells, then the library will skip output from the following cell. Care must be taken in the application to avoid explicitly attempting to set content in the next cell, otherwise the results are undefined. (Normally the wide character is displayed, and the other character is not; do not depend on that behavior.)

Older terminal applications (especially on systems like Windows 8) lack support for advanced Unicode, and thus may not fare well.

Colors

Tcell assumes the ANSI/XTerm color model, including the 256 color map that XTerm uses when it supports 256 colors. The terminfo guidance will be honored, with respect to the number of colors supported. Also, only terminals which expose ANSI style setaf and setab will support color; if you have a color terminal that only has setf and setb, please submit a ticket.

24-bit Color

Tcell supports 24-bit color! (That is, if your terminal can support it.)

NOTE: Technically the approach of using 24-bit RGB values for color is more accurately described as "direct color", but most people use the term "true color". We follow the (inaccurate) common convention.

There are a few ways you can enable (or disable) true color.

  • For many terminals, we can detect it automatically if your terminal includes the RGB or Tc capabilities (or rather it did when the database was updated.)

  • You can force this one by setting the COLORTERM environment variable to 24-bit, truecolor or 24bit. This is the same method used by most other terminal applications that support 24-bit color.

  • If you set your TERM environment variable to a value with the suffix -truecolor then 24-bit color compatible with XTerm and ECMA-48 will be assumed. (This feature is deprecated. It is recommended to use one of other methods listed above.)

  • You can disable 24-bit color by setting TCELL_TRUECOLOR=disable in your environment.

When using TrueColor, programs will display the colors that the programmer intended, overriding any "themes" you may have set in your terminal emulator. (For some cases, accurate color fidelity is more important than respecting themes. For other cases, such as typical text apps that only use a few colors, its more desirable to respect the themes that the user has established.)

Performance

Reasonable attempts have been made to minimize sending data to terminals, avoiding repeated sequences or drawing the same cell on refresh updates.

Terminfo

(Not relevant for Windows users.)

The Terminfo implementation operates with a built-in database. This should satisfy most users. However, it can also (on systems with ncurses installed), dynamically parse the output from infocmp for terminals it does not already know about.

See the terminfo/ directory for more information about generating new entries for the built-in database.

Tcell requires that the terminal support the cup mode of cursor addressing. Ancient terminals without the ability to position the cursor directly are not supported. This is unlikely to be a problem; such terminals have not been mass-produced since the early 1970s.

Mouse Support

Mouse support is detected via the kmous terminfo variable, however, enablement/disablement and decoding mouse events is done using hard coded sequences based on the XTerm X11 model. All popular terminals with mouse tracking support this model. (Full terminfo support is not possible as terminfo sequences are not defined.)

On Windows, the mouse works normally.

Mouse wheel buttons on various terminals are known to work, but the support in terminal emulators, as well as support for various buttons and live mouse tracking, varies widely. Modern xterm, macOS Terminal, and iTerm all work well.

Bracketed Paste

Terminals that appear to support the XTerm mouse model also can support bracketed paste, for applications that opt-in. See EnablePaste() for details.

Testability

There is a SimulationScreen, that can be used to simulate a real screen for automated testing. The supplied tests do this. The simulation contains event delivery, screen resizing support, and capabilities to inject events and examine "physical" screen contents.

Platforms

POSIX (Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, Solaris, etc.)

Everything works using pure Go on mainstream platforms. Some more esoteric platforms (e.g., AIX) may need to be added. Pull requests are welcome!

Windows

Windows console mode applications are supported.

Modern console applications like ConEmu and the Windows 10 terminal, support all the good features (resize, mouse tracking, etc.)

WASM

WASM is supported, but needs additional setup detailed in README-wasm.

Plan9 and others

These platforms won't work, but compilation stubs are supplied for folks that want to include parts of this in software for those platforms. The Simulation screen works, but as Tcell doesn't know how to allocate a real screen object on those platforms, NewScreen() will fail.

If anyone has wisdom about how to improve support for these, please let me know. PRs are especially welcome.

Commercial Support

Tcell is absolutely free, but if you want to obtain commercial, professional support, there are options.

  • TideLift subscriptions include support for Tcell, as well as many other open source packages.
  • Staysail Systems Inc. offers direct support, and custom development around Tcell on an hourly basis.