Cursive

Cursive is a TUI (Text User Interface) library for rust. It uses ncurses by default, but other backends are available.

It allows you to build rich user interfaces for terminal applications.

Documentation

It is designed to be safe and easy to use:

[dependencies]
cursive = "0.7"

Or to use the latest git version:

[dependencies]
cursive = { git = "https://github.com/gyscos/Cursive" }

(You will also need ncurses installed.)

extern crate cursive;

use cursive::Cursive;
use cursive::views::{Dialog, TextView};

fn main() {
    // Creates the cursive root - required for every application.
    let mut siv = Cursive::new();

    // Creates a dialog with a single "Quit" button
    siv.add_layer(Dialog::around(TextView::new("Hello Dialog!"))
                         .title("Cursive")
                         .button("Quit", |s| s.quit()));

    // Starts the event loop.
    siv.run();
}

Check out the other examples to get these results, and more:

(Colors may depend on your terminal configuration.)

Tutorials

These tutorials may help you get started with cursive:

• Starting with cursive: (1/3)
• Starting with cursive: (2/3)
• Starting with cursive: (3/3)

Third-party views

Here are a few crates implementing new views for you to use:

• cursive_table_view
• cursive_calendar_view
• cursive_tree_view
• cursive_hexview

Goals

• Ease of use. Simple apps should be simple. Complex apps should be manageable.
• Linux TTY Compatibility. Colors may suffer, and UTF-8 may be too much, but most features must work properly on a Linux TTY.
• Flexibility. This library should be able to handle simple UI scripts, complex real-time applications, or even games.
  • In particular, it tries to have enough features to recreate these kind of tools:
    • menuconfig
    • nmtui

Non-goals

• Extreme performance. This is a simple layout library, guys, not compiz piped into libcaca. Unless you are running it on your microwave's microcontroller, it's not going to be slow. That being said, it should be expected to run at decent speed on raspberry pi-level hardware.
• Multi-threaded UI. Callback methods are blocking - careful what you're doing in there! Feel free to use threads on your side, though.
• Complete ncurses equivalent. You can access the underlying ncurses window when creating your own custom views, so you can do what you want with that, but the main library will probably only use a subset of the ncurses features. Also, using ncurses at all is not guaranteed, as other backends are considered.

Compatibility

First off, terminals are messy. A small set of features is standard, but beyond that, almost every terminal has its own implementation.

Output

• Colors: the basic 8-colors palette should be broadly supported. User-defined colors is not supported in the raw linux TTY, but should work in most terminals, although it's still kinda experimental.
• UTF-8: Currently Cursive really expects a UTF-8 locale. It may eventually get patched to support window borders on other locales, but it's not a priority. There is initial support for wide characters. RTL support is planned, but still very early.

Input

• The key_codes example can be a useful tool to see how the library reacts to various key presses.
• Keep in mind that if the terminal has shortcuts registered, they probably won't be transmitted to the app.
• UTF-8 input should work fine in a unicode-enabled terminal emulator, but raw linux TTY may be more capricious.

Contributing