LTUI – A cross platform terminal UI library based on Lua | Hacker News Reader

LTUI – A cross platform terminal UI library based on Lua

github.com

126 pointstodsacerdoti15 comments

Great work.

Based on your experience, how difficult do you think it would be to create a library that does does terminal UI rendering, but declaratively?

Something like this for eg: https://github.com/jtdaugherty/brick

I've been a fan of https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink for awhile. Its based off React with a custom renderer. I like it a lot and find it pretty easy to use.

TekUI does that, see http://tekui.neoscientists.org/tutorials.html

  ui = require "tek.ui"
  ui.Application:new
  {
  Children =
  {
    ui.Window:new
    {
      Title = "Hello",
      Children =
      {
        ui.Text:new
        {
          Text = "Hello, World!",
          Class = "button",
          Mode = "button",
          Width = "auto"
        }
      }
    }
  }
  }:run()

A few years ago I build a small application [1] using react-blessed [0] which is a React renderer for blessed which is similar to ncurses. I think it was pretty easy to create an terminal-based application with it.

[0]: https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed [1]: https://github.com/renke/overviewer

This is really cool, and great to see Lua project on HN, I think it's a woefully undervalued language. If someone knows LTUI 2 questions:

1. I tried to find api docs, but it didn't leap out at me. Is there one?

2. i wonder how you can include LTUI with an existing event loop. (hence why I was looking for #1) app:run() is great if the UI is the standalone app, but if I'm doing async io or any other more complex lua app, I have to combined the two event loops.

If only my system was big enough to have ncurses this would be super cool and I'd use it right away. <shigh>

1. No docs now, you need see source codes. e.g. tests/*.lua 2. Perhaps you need call coroutine.yield or other coroutine/wait methods to program:loop() to support two event loops.

My favorite:

https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed

Yeah, truly impressive.

The visual configuration menu used in xmake is ltui.

    xmake f --menu

https://github.com/tboox/xmake

I was getting ready to complain about accessibility which is always an afterthought in new GUI libs, but it seems like this would actually be natively fairly accessible being a terminal driven GUI, correct?

Depends on who you expect it to be accessible to; but for the visually impaired, it's probably better to try the other interfaces to something. GUIs and TUIs are generally not good value for time in this case, and TUIs have no existing technology for interfacing with screen readers as far as I can tell.

Lua - the language JavaScript should have been.

It's really nice to see projects like this, as IMO the only thing keeping Lua from seeing wider use is that it lacks JS and Python's userbase and libraries.

This looks incredibly useful. Looked for something like it a couple years ago and ultimately gave up.

Thanks for sharing.

Oh, it seems to be a great terminal ui library.

Great work!

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