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ruscii

An easy-to-use library for writing terminal applications and games in Rust.

The aim of this project is to make text-based game development straightforward and effortless. Any contribution, issue, or pull request would be greatly appreciated!

Features

  • Optimized to render fast in terminals
  • Multiplatform (Linux, Windows and macOS)
    • For Linux, it is required to have a x11 server (most distributions come with one included). Internally, ruscii uses it to create transparent key-pressed and key-released events.
  • Support for multiple terminals (See Crossterm's terminal support)
  • Provides key press and release events in terminal (essential for games!)
  • Simplistic API - make your terminal-based game in relatively few lines!
  • Provides an easy way to recover the terminal in an error state

Dependencies

Linux

To compile applications written using ruscii in Linux, you must have the X11 development libraries installed.

If your system does not have them, you can use the following commands in the terminal to install them according to your specific Linux distribution.

  • In Ubuntu or Debian: 
    sudo apt install libx11-dev
  • In Fedora, RHEL, or CentOS: 
    sudo dnf install xorg-x11-server-devel

Windows and macOS

Windows and macOS have no special dependencies.

Examples

You can find several examples of applications and games written using ruscii in the examples folder.

To test one out, install ruscii with the examples flag using the following command.

cargo install ruscii --examples
~/.cargo/bin/<example_name>

After it's installed, run it with:

cargo run --example <example_name> --release

Example Games

Space Invaders (200 lines)

asciicast

Pong (150 lines)

asciicast

Note: the first asciimedia playback might be laggy; playing it a second time fixes this issue.

Projects Using ruscii

  • thrust - A simple space shooter game. Runs in the terminal using character-based UI.
  • terminal-tetris - 🕹️ Tetris in the terminal written in Rust.
  • chemcreator - A text-based tool for identifying organic molecules.

If you have a project using ruscii and would like it to appear here, open an issue!

Getting Started

Installation

Add the following line to the [dependencies] section in your Cargo.toml file:

ruscii = "0.4.0"

Test it in your own terminal!

Copy the following code to your main.rs file to run the base ruscii application:

use ruscii::app::{App, State};
use ruscii::terminal::{Window};
use ruscii::drawing::{Pencil};
use ruscii::keyboard::{KeyEvent, Key};
use ruscii::spatial::{Vec2};
use ruscii::gui::{FPSCounter};

fn main() {
    let mut fps_counter = FPSCounter::default();
    let mut app = App::default();

    app.run(|app_state: &mut State, window: &mut Window| {
        for key_event in app_state.keyboard().last_key_events() {
            match key_event {
                KeyEvent::Pressed(Key::Esc) => app_state.stop(),
                KeyEvent::Pressed(Key::Q) => app_state.stop(),
                _ => (),
            }
        }

        fps_counter.update();

        let mut pencil = Pencil::new(window.canvas_mut());
        pencil.draw_text(&format!("FPS: {}", fps_counter.count()), Vec2::xy(1, 1));
    });
}

Debugging

Debugging a terminal app is usually difficult because the app output and the backtrace goes to the same terminal view. ruscii uses the standard output to render your app and the standard error to log error information. We recommend that you redirect the standard error to a file to be inspected later.

To run your project with error logs saved to a file, run the following commands:

export RUST_BACKTRACE=1
cargo run 2> my_stderr

All error output will be saved to my_stderr in the project directory.