12 KiB
brick
is a Haskell terminal user interface (TUI) programming toolkit.
To use it, you write a pure function that describes how your user
interface should be drawn based on your current application state and
you provide a state transformation function to handle events.
brick
exposes a declarative API. Unlike most GUI toolkits which
require you to write a long and tedious sequence of widget creations
and layout setup, brick
just requires you to describe your interface
using a set of declarative layout combinators. Event-handling is done by
pattern-matching on incoming events and updating your application state.
Under the hood, this library builds upon
vty, so some knowledge of Vty
will be necessary to use this library. Brick depends on
vty-crossplatform
, so Brick should work anywhere Vty works (Unix and
Windows). Brick releases prior to 2.0 only support Unix-based systems.
Example
Here's an example interface (see programs/ReadmeDemo.hs
):
joinBorders $
withBorderStyle unicode $
borderWithLabel (str "Hello!") $
(center (str "Left") <+> vBorder <+> center (str "Right"))
Result:
┌─────────Hello!─────────┐
│ │ │
│ │ │
│ Left │ Right │
│ │ │
│ │ │
└───────────┴────────────┘
Featured Projects
To get an idea of what some people have done with brick
, check out
these projects. If you have made something and would like me to include
it, get in touch!
Project | Description |
---|---|
2048Haskell |
An implementation of the 2048 game |
babel-cards |
A TUI spaced-repetition memorization tool. Similar to Anki. |
bhoogle |
A Hoogle client |
brewsage |
A TUI for Homebrew |
brick-trading-journal |
A TUI program that calculates basic statistics from trades |
Brickudoku |
A hybrid of Tetris and Sudoku |
cbookview |
A TUI for exploring polyglot chess opening book files |
clifm |
A file manager |
codenames-haskell |
An implementation of the Codenames game |
fifteen |
An implementation of the 15 puzzle |
ghcup |
A TUI for ghcup , the Haskell toolchain manager |
git-brunch |
A git branch checkout utility |
Giter |
A UI wrapper around Git CLI inspired by Magit. |
gotta-go-fast |
A typing tutor |
haradict |
A TUI Arabic dictionary powered by ElixirFM |
hascard |
A program for reviewing "flash card" notes |
haskell-player |
An afplay frontend |
herms |
A command-line tool for managing kitchen recipes |
hic-hac-hoe |
Play tic tac toe in terminal! |
hledger-iadd |
An interactive terminal UI for adding hledger journal entries |
hledger-ui |
A terminal UI for the hledger accounting system. |
homodoro |
A terminal application to use the pomodoro technique and keep track of daily tasks |
htyper |
A typing speed test program |
hyahtzee2 |
Famous Yahtzee dice game |
kpxhs |
An interactive Keepass database viewer |
matterhorn |
A client for Mattermost |
maze |
A Brick-based maze game |
monalog |
Terminal logs observer |
mushu |
An MPD client |
mywork [Hackage] |
A tool to keep track of the projects you are working on |
pboy |
A tiny PDF organizer |
purebred |
A mail user agent |
sandwich |
A test framework with a TUI interface |
silly-joy |
An interpreter for Joy |
solitaire |
The card game |
sudoku-tui |
A Sudoku implementation |
summoner-tui |
An interactive frontend to the Summoner tool |
swarm |
A 2D programming and resource gathering game |
tart |
A mouse-driven ASCII art drawing program |
tetris |
An implementation of the Tetris game |
thock |
A modern TUI typing game featuring online racing against friends |
timeloop |
A time-travelling demonstrator |
towerHanoi |
Animated solutions to The Tower of Hanoi |
ttyme |
A TUI for Harvest |
ullekha |
An interactive terminal notes/todo app with file/redis persistence |
viewprof |
A GHC profile viewer |
VOIDSPACE |
A space-themed typing-tutor game |
wordle |
An implementation of the Wordle game |
wrapping-editor |
An embeddable editor with support for Brick |
youbrick |
A feed aggregator and launcher for Youtube channels |
These third-party packages also extend brick
:
Project | Description |
---|---|
brick-filetree [Hackage] |
A widget for exploring a directory tree and selecting or flagging files and directories |
brick-panes [Hackage] |
A Brick overlay library providing composition and isolation of screen areas for TUI apps. |
Release Announcements / News
Find out about brick
releases and other news on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/brick_haskell/
Getting Started
Check out the many demo programs to get a feel for different aspects of the library:
$ cabal new-build -f demos
$ find dist-newstyle -type f -name \*-demo
To get started, see the user guide.
Documentation
Documentation for brick
comes in a variety of forms:
Feature Overview
brick
comes with a bunch of batteries included:
- Vertical and horizontal box layout widgets
- Basic single- and multi-line text editor widgets
- List and table widgets
- Progress bar widget
- Simple dialog box widget
- Border-drawing widgets (put borders around or in between things)
- Generic scrollable viewports and viewport scroll bars
- General-purpose layout control combinators
- Extensible widget-building API
- User-customizable attribute themes
- Type-safe, validated input form API (see the
Brick.Forms
module) - A filesystem browser for file and directory selection
- Borders can be configured to automatically connect!
Brick Discussion
There are two forums for discussing brick-related things:
- The Discussions page on the github repo, and
- The
brick-users
Google Group / e-mail list. You can subscribe here.
Status
There are some places were I have deliberately chosen to worry about
performance later for the sake of spending more time on the design
(and to wait on performance issues to arise first). brick
is also
something of an experimental project of mine and some aspects of the
design involve trade-offs that might not be right for your application.
Brick is not intended to be all things to all people; rather, I want it
to provide a good foundation for building complex terminal interfaces
in a declarative style to take away specific headaches of building,
modifying, and working with such interfaces, all while seeing how far we
can get with a pure function to specify the interface.
brick
exports an extension API that makes it possible to make your own
packages and widgets. If you use that, you'll also be helping to test
whether the exported interface is usable and complete!
A note on Windows support
Brick supports Windows implicitly by way of Vty's Windows support. While I don't (and can't) personally test Brick on Windows hosts, it should be possible to use Brick on Windows. If you have any trouble, report any issues here. If needed, we'll migrate them to the vty-windows repository if they need to be fixed there.
Reporting bugs
Please file bug reports as GitHub issues. For best results:
-
Include the versions of relevant software packages: your terminal emulator,
brick
,ghc
,vty
, and Vty platform packages will be the most important ones. -
Clearly describe the behavior you expected ...
-
... and include a minimal demonstration program that exhibits the behavior you actually observed.
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.
- Please make changes consistent with the conventions I've used in the codebase.
- Please adjust or provide Haddock and/or user guide documentation relevant to any changes you make.
- Please ensure that commits are
-Wall
clean. - Please ensure that each commit makes a single, logical, isolated change as much as possible.
- Please do not submit changes that your linter told you to make. I will probably decline them. Relatedly: please do not submit changes that change only style without changing functionality.
- Please do NOT include package version changes in your patches. Package version changes are only done at release time when the full scope of a release's changes can be evaluated to determine the appropriate version change.