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13485 :: textalot- TUI I/O library written in Nim

• erayzesen (orginal) [2025-11-01T05:58:33+01:00] view original

  Hello everyone. I wanted to share a TUI library I wrote entirely in Nim. This will also serve as a lower-level layer for a more high-level TUI library I’ll complete later, called boxalot — which will include a layout system and widgets. It cleanly handles the input, buffering, and rendering processes. It provides you with the necessary terminal events and allows you to perform basic text output and drawing operations in the terminal.

  https://github.com/erayzesen/textalot

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• enthus1ast (orginal) [2025-11-02T00:41:03+01:00] view original

  Nice! Please really consider making it cross platform. It would be nice to have a (maintained) one stop shop for TUI, since illwill has a few limitations and bugs, that noone has the willpower to fix.

  When i wrote the mouse support for illwill on windows i basically just filtered for mouse and left the rest of the events be processed in the posix way. So you could have a look at this code and make it work on windows.

  My wishes for a Nim TUI library:

  • Cross Platform: Linux, Windows, Macos/Freebsd
  • Blocking and non blocking event reading
  • Support for unicode (german umlauts öäüÖÄÜ will crash illwill, on windows it even crashed cmd.exe)
  • tbh i like illwill's api its quite easy to build widgets ( https://github.com/enthus1ast/illwillWidgets ) on top of it, so you might want to have a look at those as well

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• erayzesen (orginal) [2025-11-02T02:58:21+01:00] view original

  Hi, @enthus1ast thanks for your comment.

  • The project currently targets only Unix systems (Linux, macOS, etc.). I might add Windows support later if I decide the dependency, code, and maintenance overhead is low enough — or if someone from the community implements it cleanly and contributes it. That said, even among C libraries, there are very few that can handle both Unix and Windows targets with full stability.
  • From a modern perspective, events are handled in a non-blocking manner. Other languages might avoid this approach, but Nim easily has the performance to handle it efficiently. As you know, the blocking model comes with its own limitations. (Though this option might be added later.)
  • Unicode is supported, so you shouldn’t experience issues in that area.
  • If you’ve built a widget library for IllWill, you can easily adapt it to work with textalot — just import textalot into your project and adjust the drawing methods.

  I’ve just released the project, so you might run into some issues. If you try it and find any bugs, please don’t hesitate to report them.

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• oyster (orginal) [2025-11-03T01:50:33+01:00] view original

  vote for windows too

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• Araq (orginal) [2025-11-03T07:08:41+01:00] view original

  Could it have been based on terminal.nim which offers Windows support? I don't know. :-)

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• nimaoth (orginal) [2025-11-03T09:41:29+01:00] view original

  For windows support, although it's not a library, but I wrote this for my editor https://github.com/Nimaoth/Nev/blob/main/src/terminal_input.nim. It's based on the libvterm parser, but adjusted for input. It parses key/mouse and other events in the posix way, also supports kitty keyboard protocol partially, but if you set up the console on windows correctly (using ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING and ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_INPUT) that also works on windows.

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• thearchivalone (orginal) [2025-11-03T17:47:36+01:00] view original

  Having Windows support would be nice but it at least builds on my Mac, Linux and BSD box. I haven’t tested much yet but congratulations. :D

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