BearLibTerminal provides a pseudoterminal window with a grid of character cells and a simple yet powerful API for flexible textual output and uncomplicated input processing.
- Unicode support: you can use UTF-8 or UTF-16/32 wide strings easily.
- Support for bitmap and vector (TrueType) fonts and tilesets.
- Extended output facilities: tile composition, alignment, offsets.
- High performance (uses OpenGL).
- Keyboard and mouse support.
- Bindings for several programming languages: С/С++, C#, Go, Lua, Pascal, Python, Ruby.
- Windows, Linux and OS X support.
- Reference (functions, constants, behaviour)
- Design overview
Some notes about using it with various languages or compilers:
With the arrival of CMake 14, a script was added that allows to get repositories from the Internet, taking into account this the user TheLartians decided to write a script for CMake that acts as a package manager. In my opinion, this marks a new step for C++ and CMake, allowing work with libraries that are downloaded and updated without direct intervention of the user.
To use this library, you need the script written by TheLartians,
named CPM.cmake (acronym for CMake
Package Manager). Add it to your project, for example, under the directory
CMakeModules
and then in your CMakeFiles.txt
write the following:
Include(CMakeModules/CPM.cmake)
CPMAddPackage(
NAME BearLibTerminal
VERSION 2020.12
GITHUB_REPOSITORY Andres6936/BearLibTerminal
)
TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES(<TARGET> PRIVATE BearLibTerminal::Framework)
- The directory
CMakeModules
should be created in case it does not exist. <TARGET>
must be replaced by the executable to which you will link BearLibTerminal.
Python packages are available. You can install everything you need to use the library with
pip install bearlibterminal
Depending on the OS and Python installation, you might also want to
- Replace
pip
withpip3
orpython3 -m pip
to select a correct version of Python. - Add
--user
flag to install package locally (i. e. user-wide).
Package contains both wrapper and an appropriate binary for the platform, so you do not need to copy anything else anywhere. Just import the library in the source:
from bearlibterminal import terminal
terminal.open()
terminal.printf(2, 1, "Hello, world!")
terminal.refresh()
while terminal.read() != terminal.TK_CLOSE:
pass
terminal.close()
Wrapper for Lua is built-in. You need to use a regular (dynamic) Lua runtime and place BearLibTerminal binary in a suitable location (e. g. in the same directory as script). For Linux you'll also need to rename the .so to just 'BearLibTerminal.so' (dropping the 'lib' prefix). After that it would be possible to import the library the usual way:
local terminal = require "BearLibTerminal"
BearLibTerminal is a language-agnostic dynamic-link library (.dll/.so/.dylib), therefore you generally do not have to build it yourself and may simply use the prebuilt binaries.
To build BearLibTerminal you will need CMake and a recent GCC/MinGW compiler. For Linux any GCC version 4.6.3 and above will do. For Windows there are several MinGW builds with various quirks, using TDM-GCC or mingw-builds (a flavour of mingw-w64) is recommended. MinGW compiler MUST use Posix thread model.
The library is licensed mainly under the MIT license with a few parts under other permissive licenses.