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 (thedevelop
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.
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 Home
- Terminal.Gui Overview
- List of Views/Controls
- Conceptual Documentation
- API Documentation
The Documentation matches the most recent Nuget release from the main
branch ()
- 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
, andPadding
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.
- 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.
- 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 theExample
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
andReactiveUI
withTerminal.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 ReactiveUIWhenAnyValue
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.
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
Use NuGet to install the Terminal.Gui
NuGet package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Terminal.Gui
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.
- Windows, Mac, and Linux - Build and run using the .NET SDK command line tools (
dotnet build
in the root directory). RunUICatalog
withdotnet run --project UICatalog
. - Windows - Open
Terminal.sln
with Visual Studio 2022.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions for downloading and forking the source.
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Debates on architecture and design can be found in Issues tagged with design.
See gui-cs for how this project came to be.