gui-cs.Terminal.Gui

The current, stable, release of Terminal.Gui is v1.x. It is stable, rich, and broadly used. The team is now focused on designing and building a significant upgrade we're referring to as v2. Therefore:

• v1 is now in maintenance mode, meaning we will accept PRs for v1.x (the develop branch) only for issues impacting existing functionality.
• All new development happens on the v2_develop branch. See the V2 discussion here.
• Developers are encouraged to continue building on v1.x until we announce v2 is stable.

Terminal.Gui: A toolkit for building rich console apps for .NET, .NET Core, and Mono that works on Windows, the Mac, and Linux/Unix.

Quick Start

Paste these commands into your favorite terminal on Windows, Mac, or Linux. This will install the Terminal.Gui.Templates, create a new "Hello World" TUI app, and run it.

(Press CTRL-Q to exit the app)

dotnet new --install Terminal.Gui.templates
dotnet new tui -n myproj
cd myproj
dotnet run

Documentation

• Documentation Home
• Terminal.Gui Overview
• List of Views/Controls
• Conceptual Documentation
• API Documentation

The Documentation matches the most recent Nuget release from the main branch ()

New in Version 2

• Modern Look & Feel - Apps built with Terminal.Gui now look and feel modern thanks to these improvements:
  • TrueColor support - 24-bit color support for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Legacy 16-color systems are still supported, automatically. See TrueColor for details.
  • User Configurable Color Themes - See Color Themes for details.
  • *Enhanced Unicode/Wide Character support *- Terminal.Gui now supports the full range of Unicode/wide characters. See Unicode for details.
  • Line Canvas - Terminal.Gui now supports a line canvas enabling high performance drawing of lines and shapes using box-drawing glyphs. LineCanvas provides auto join, a smart TUI drawing system that auotmatically selects the correct line/box drawing glyphs for intersections making drawing complex shapes easy. See Line Canvas for details.
  • Enhanced Borders and Padding - Terminal.Gui now supports a Border, Margin, and Padding property on all views. This simplifies View development and enables more sophisticated look and fee. See Padding for details.
  • Modern File Dialog - Terminal.Gui now supports a modern file dialog that includes icons (in TUI!) for files/folders, search, and a tree-view. See FileDialog for details.
• Configuration Manager - Terminal.Gui now supports a configuration manager enabling library and app settings to be persisted and loaded from the file system. See Configuration Manager for details.
• Simplified API - The entire library has been reviewed and simplified. As a result the API is more consistent and uses modern .NET API standards (e.g. for events). This refactoring resulted in the removal of thousands of lines of code, better unit tests, and higher-performance than v1. See Simplified API for details.

Features

• Cross Platform - Windows, Mac, and Linux. Terminal drivers for Curses, Windows Console, and the .NET Console mean apps will work well on both color and monochrome terminals.
• Keyboard and Mouse Input - Both keyboard and mouse input are supported, including support for drag & drop.
• Flexible Layout - Supports both Absolute layout and an innovative Computed Layout system. Computed Layout makes it easy to lay out controls relative to each other and enables dynamic terminal UIs.
• Clipboard support - Cut, Copy, and Paste of text provided through the Clipboard class.
• Arbitrary Views - All visible UI elements are subclasses of the View class, and these in turn can contain an arbitrary number of sub-views.
• Advanced App Features - The Mainloop supports processing events, idle handlers, timers, and monitoring file descriptors. Most classes are safe for threading.
• Reactive Extensions - Use reactive extensions and benefit from increased code readability, and the ability to apply the MVVM pattern and ReactiveUI data bindings. See the source code of a sample app in order to learn how to achieve this.

Showcase & Examples

• UI Catalog - The UI Catalog project provides an easy to use and extend sample illustrating the capabilities of Terminal.Gui. Run dotnet run --project UICatalog to run the UI Catalog.
• C# Example - Run dotnet run in the Example directory to run the C# Example.
• F# Example - An example showing how to build a Terminal.Gui app using F#.
• Reactive Example - A sample app that shows how to use System.Reactive and ReactiveUI with Terminal.Gui. The app uses the MVVM architecture that may seem familiar to folks coming from WPF, Xamarin Forms, UWP, Avalonia, or Windows Forms. In this app, we implement the data bindings using ReactiveUI WhenAnyValue syntax and Pharmacist — a tool that converts all events in a NuGet package into observable wrappers.
• PowerShell's Out-ConsoleGridView - OCGV sends the output from a command to an interactive table.
• F7History - Graphical Command History for PowerShell (built on PowerShell's Out-ConsoleGridView).
• PoshRedisViewer - A compact Redis viewer module for PowerShell written in F#.
• PoshDotnetDumpAnalyzeViewer - dotnet-dump UI module for PowerShell.
• TerminalGuiDesigner - Cross platform view designer for building Terminal.Gui applications.

See the Terminal.Gui/ README for an overview of how the library is structured. The Conceptual Documentation provides insight into core concepts.

Sample Usage in C

The following example shows a basic Terminal.Gui application in C#:

// A simple Terminal.Gui example in C# - using C# 9.0 Top-level statements

using Terminal.Gui;

Application.Run<ExampleWindow> ();

System.Console.WriteLine ($"Username: {((ExampleWindow)Application.Top).usernameText.Text}");

// Before the application exits, reset Terminal.Gui for clean shutdown
Application.Shutdown ();

// Defines a top-level window with border and title
public class ExampleWindow : Window {
	public TextField usernameText;
	
	public ExampleWindow ()
	{
		Title = "Example App (Ctrl+Q to quit)";

		// Create input components and labels
		var usernameLabel = new Label () { 
			Text = "Username:" 
		};

		usernameText = new TextField ("") {
			// Position text field adjacent to the label
			X = Pos.Right (usernameLabel) + 1,

			// Fill remaining horizontal space
			Width = Dim.Fill (),
		};

		var passwordLabel = new Label () {
			Text = "Password:",
			X = Pos.Left (usernameLabel),
			Y = Pos.Bottom (usernameLabel) + 1
		};

		var passwordText = new TextField ("") {
			Secret = true,
			// align with the text box above
			X = Pos.Left (usernameText),
			Y = Pos.Top (passwordLabel),
			Width = Dim.Fill (),
		};

		// Create login button
		var btnLogin = new Button () {
			Text = "Login",
			Y = Pos.Bottom(passwordLabel) + 1,
			// center the login button horizontally
			X = Pos.Center (),
			IsDefault = true,
		};

		// When login button is clicked display a message popup
		btnLogin.Clicked += () => {
			if (usernameText.Text == "admin" && passwordText.Text == "password") {
				MessageBox.Query ("Logging In", "Login Successful", "Ok");
				Application.RequestStop ();
			} else {
				MessageBox.ErrorQuery ("Logging In", "Incorrect username or password", "Ok");
			}
		};

		// Add the views to the Window
		Add (usernameLabel, usernameText, passwordLabel, passwordText, btnLogin);
	}
}

When run the application looks as follows:

Sample application running

Installing

Use NuGet to install the Terminal.Gui NuGet package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Terminal.Gui

Installation in .NET Core Projects

To install Terminal.Gui into a .NET Core project, use the dotnet CLI tool with this command.

dotnet add package Terminal.Gui

Or, you can use the Terminal.Gui.Templates.

Building the Library and Running the Examples

• Windows, Mac, and Linux - Build and run using the .NET SDK command line tools (dotnet build in the root directory). Run UICatalog with dotnet run --project UICatalog.
• Windows - Open Terminal.sln with Visual Studio 2022.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions for downloading and forking the source.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Debates on architecture and design can be found in Issues tagged with design.

History

See gui-cs for how this project came to be.