Dart Terminal

A fun and minimalist experiment in crafting terminal UIs with Dart.

Key Concepts

This project aims to provide an intuitive and ergonomic API for building, emulating, and interacting with terminal applications in Dart. It's designed to be a low-level building block for more complex terminal applications, such as text editors, games, and interactive command-line interfaces.

Buffer

A Buffer is a two-dimensional grid of characters with an associated style. It is the primary building block for rendering text-based content to the terminal, and it can be used to build more complex UI components. For example, a Buffer can be used to render text, boxes, and sprites:

import 'package:dt/rendering.dart';

void main() {
  final buffer = Buffer(10, 3, '#');
  buffer.print(0, 1, 'Hello, World!');
  
  // ##########
  // Hello, Wor
  // ##########
  buffer.rows.forEach((row) => print(row.map((cell) => cell.symbol).join()));
}

Surface

A Surface is a high-level abstraction for writing Buffers to the terminal:

import 'package:dt/terminal.dart';

void main() {
  final surface = Surface.fromStdout();

  surface.draw((frame) {
    frame.draw((buffer) {
      buffer.print(0, 1, 'Hello, World!');
    });
  });
}

Contributing

CI/CD

This package is:

• Formatted with dart format.
• Checked with dart analyze.
• Tested with dart test, including with code coverage (see tool/coverage.dart).

Inspiration

This package is inspired by a number of libraries, including but not limited to:

• crossterm: A Rust library for cross-platform terminal manipulation.
• dart_console: A Dart library for terminal manipulation.
• fortress: A Dart library for building retro-style games.
• hex_toolkit: A Dart library for hexagonal grids.
• mini_sprite: A Dart library for sprite-based rendering.
• pathxp and pathfinding: Dart libraries for pathfinding algorithms.
• ratatui: A Rust library for building terminal UIs.
• taffy: UI layout library for Rust.
• termenv: A Go library for terminal feature detection and styling.
• termion: A Rust library for low-level bindless terminal manipulation.
• termwiz: Another Rust library for building a terminal emulator.
• vaxis: A Rust library for building terminal UIs.