https://github.com/gyscos/Cursive
Check out the other examples to get these results, and more:
(Colors may depend on your terminal configuration.)
Goals
Ease of use. Simple apps should be simple. Complex apps should be manageable.
Linux TTY Compatibility. Colors may suffer, and UTF-8 may be too much, but most features must work properly on a Linux TTY.
Flexibility. This library should be able to handle simple UI scripts, complex real-time applications, or even games.
menuconfig
nmtui
In particular, it tries to have enough features to recreate these kind of tools:
Non-goals
Extreme performance. This is a simple layout library, guys, not compiz piped into libcaca. Unless you are running it on your microwave's microcontroller, it's not going to be slow.
Multi-threaded UI. Callback methods are blocking - careful what you're doing in there! Feel free to use threads on your side, though.
Complete ncurses equivalent. You can access the underlying ncurses window when creating your own custom views, so you can do what you want with that, but the main library will probably only use a subset of the ncurses features.
Compatibility
First off, terminals are messy. A small set of features is standard, but beyond that, almost every terminal has its own implementation.
Output
Colors: the basic 8-colors palette should be broadly supported. User-defined colors is not supported in the raw linux TTY, but should work in most terminals, although it's still kinda experimental.
UTF-8: Currently Cursive really expects a UTF-8 locale. It may eventually get patched to support window borders on other locales, but it's not a priority. Also, Cursive currently expects every codepoint to be a one-column character, so some things may break with exotic characters...
Input
The
key_codes
example can be a useful tool to see how the library reacts to various key presses.Keep in mind that if the terminal has shortcuts registered, they probably won't be transmitted to the app.
UTF-8 input should work fine in a unicode-enabled terminal emulator, but raw linux TTY may be more capricious.