Wretched

I wanted a curses-style fullscreen application framework that could be powered by React. Check out https://github.com/wretched-tui/wretched-react for the React renderer for Wretched.

colors.ts

bun demo colors.ts

inputs.ts

bun demo inputs.ts

demo code

import {Screen, Box, Stack, Text, Button, interceptConsoleLog} from 'wretched'

// Recommended:
interceptConsoleLog()
// While the terminal is in full screen mode, you probably don't want to log
// debug info to stdout - it will appear wherever the cursor happens to be,
// and will clobber your output. You can mount the <ConsoleLog /> to view logs,
// otherwise when you exit (Ctrl-C) the logs will be flushed to stdout.

Screen.start(
  new Box({
    border: 'single',
    children: [
      Stack.down([
        new Text({text: 'First, there was Ncurses'}),
        new Button({text: 'Tell me more!'}),
      ]),
    ],
  }),
)

History

First there was Ncurses. Well wait, before Ncurses there was Curses, so first there was, ah wait, there was termcap, then curses, then ~Ncurses~ pcurses and then Ncurses. tput and terminfo were in there somewhere, too.

Then came about twenty years of other stuff.

Then came blessed, and it was really amazing! Look through the source and imagine writing all that by yourself. Mind blown.

Fast-forward a few years and Flexbox and React and declarative UI showed up, and blessed didn't notice or care by then.

And now comes wretched. I stripped down blessed to only the tput/program/events/colors/unicode parts, and reimplemented React components and Stack layouts.

It's got way less "stuff" in it than blessed... but then again blessed had a truly mind-blowing amount of "stuff" to it.