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vty is a terminal interface library. It provides a high-level interface for doing terminal I/O. Vty is supported on GHC versions 7.10.1 and up.

Install via git with:

git clone git://github.com/jtdaugherty/vty.git

Install via cabal with:

cabal install vty

Features

  • Supports a large number of terminals, i.e., vt100, ansi, hurd, linux, screen, etc., or anything with a sufficient terminfo entry.

  • Automatically handles window resizes.

  • Supports Unicode output on terminals with UTF-8 support.

  • Provides an efficient output algorithm. Output buffering and terminal state changes are minimized.

  • Minimizes repaint area, which virtually eliminates the flicker problems that plague ncurses programs.

  • Provides a pure, compositional interface for efficiently constructing display images.

  • Automatically decodes keyboard keys into (key,[modifier]) tuples.

  • Automatically supports refresh on Ctrl-L.

  • Supports a keypress timeout after for lone ESC. The timeout is customizable.

  • Provides extensible input and output interfaces.

  • Supports ANSI graphics modes (SGR as defined in console_codes(4)) with a type-safe interface and graceful fallback for terminals with limited or nonexistent support for such modes.

  • Properly handles cleanup (but not due to signals).

  • Provides a comprehensive test suite.

  • Supports "normal" and "extended" (SGR) mouse modes as described at http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h2-Mouse-Tracking

  • Supports bracketed paste mode as described at http://cirw.in/blog/bracketed-paste

  • Supports multi-column Unicode characters such as emoji characters. In cases where Vty and your terminal emulator disagree on character widths, Vty provides a tool vty-build-width-table and library functionality to build a width table that will work for your terminal and load it on application startup.

Development Notes

Vty uses threads internally, so programs made with Vty need to be compiled with the threaded runtime using the GHC -threaded option.

Platform Support

Posix Terminals

For the most part, Vty uses terminfo to determine terminal protocol with some special rules to handle some omissions from terminfo.

Windows

Windows is not supported.

Contributing

If you decide to contribute, that's great! Here are some guidelines you should consider to make submitting patches easier for all concerned:

  • If you want to take on big things, talk to me first; let's have a design/vision discussion before you start coding. Create a GitHub issue and we can use that as the place to hash things out.
  • If you make changes, make them consistent with the syntactic conventions already used in the codebase.
  • Please provide Haddock documentation for any changes you make.

Development Notes

Code Coverage

To evaluate coverage, configure as follows:

rm -rf dist ; cabal configure --enable-tests --enable-library-coverage \
  --disable-library-profiling \
  --disable-executable-profiling

Profiling

rm -rf dist ; cabal configure --enable-tests --disable-library-coverage \
  --enable-library-profiling \
  --enable-executable-profiling

Known Issues

  • Terminals have numerous quirks and bugs, so mileage may vary. Please report issues as you encounter them and provide details on your terminal emulator, operating system, etc.

  • STOP, TERM and INT signals are not handled.

  • The character encoding of the terminal is assumed to be UTF-8 if unicode is used.

  • Terminfo is assumed to be correct unless there is an override configured. Some terminals will not have correct special key support (shifted F10 etc). See Config for customizing vty's behavior for a particular terminal.

  • Vty uses the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl to find the current window size, which appears to be limited to Linux and BSD.

Further Reading

Good sources of documentation for terminal programming are: