AppCUI

This logo is an application made with AppCUI.

AppCUI is a cross-platform TUI builder. The users of this library can construct an interface using its basic building blocks such as: Window, Button, Label, etc.

Generally speaking, the library allows to build a virtual desktop, with multiple windows and extensible components.

The first example is ListView, an application to showcase US states and their basic information like Population, Capital. The user is greeted with an initial window with list view options, like whether the columns are sortable or whether the column separators are visible, after that, a button is pressed to spawn another window with a list view, showcasing the US states.

The library displays the whole spectre of ASCII (and ASCII extended, via Code Page 437) characters, but also a wide range of UTF16 characters.

In this example we can see the display of characters with values from 0 to 255, UTF8 Box Drawing characters, as well as UTF16 symbols, russian and romanian characters.

Also check out some of our more advanced controls such as PropertyList that allows one to configure the behavior of different controls or object.

AppCUI support themes and the posibility to change and modify the way AppCUI controls are drawn.

AppCUI also supports animantions with a stable 30 frames per second, BadApple is an ascii art animation, that is also a good example of custom drawing and extensibility of components.

While the rendering of components, layering and colors management is done in the backend, several options are available for display. In here, we call them Frontends.

1. Windows Console is available on Windows systems and provides full functionality for interaction like mouse click, drag, keyboard, resizing, etc.
2. SDL2 is available as a frontend for all systems including Windows, OSX and Unix. It also provides full functionality. Apps based on SDL2 will run in a separate window.
3. NCurses with limited functionality is available for Unix and OSX systems. Apps based on ncurses will run in any terminal, including iterm, terminal, xterm and so on, but will not have the whole set of mouse movements or access to the full keyboard button range (due to limitations in terminals themselves).
4. Custom - a frontend implemented by the application itself (Application::CustomFrontendInterface): headless rendering for tests or screenshots, a screen streamed over the network, recorded sessions, ...

While frontends may be different, AppCUI strives to provide cross-platform support so that the same app looks, feels and behaves the same on every system.

More about frontends can be found here.

Detailed informations can be found here.

AppCUI is a C++20 library built with CMake. Its dependencies (SDL2, SDL2_ttf, FreeType, libpng, libjpeg-turbo, bzip2, brotli and, on Unix / OSX, ncurses) are built automatically by the vcpkg copy included as a git submodule - no manual installation is needed.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/gdt050579/AppCUI.git
cd AppCUI
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config Release

The library and the examples are written to the bin folder. Requirements:

• a C++20 compiler (Visual Studio 2022, GCC, Clang / Xcode command line tools) and CMake 3.13+ (Ninja recommended)
• on Linux, the X11 / OpenGL development packages needed to build SDL2 - the CI uses: sudo apt-get install -y build-essential cmake ninja-build libsdl2-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libltdl-dev

If the repository was cloned without --recursive, run git submodule update --init --recursive. See Getting started for using AppCUI from another CMake project.

The documentation (guides and the API reference of AppCUI/include/AppCUI.hpp) is built with Sphinx; the API reference is generated by Doxygen and rendered with Breathe. Sources are in the docs folder:

cd docs
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt   # Sphinx, Breathe, sphinx-rtd-theme
make html                                   # make.bat html on Windows

Doxygen must be installed (or set the DOXYGEN environment variable to its path); APPCUI_DOCS_SKIP_API=1 builds the guides only. The HTML pages are written to docs/build/html.

On every commit to main, the documentation is built (warnings are errors) and published to gh-pages.