Jumbee.Console

About

Jumbee.Console is a .NET library for advanced TUIs that focuses on performance and usability. Inspired by libs like ratatui and Textual, it tries to provide a high-performance retained-mode library that is easy-to-use with idiomatic .NET GUI and Task patterns, while flexible enough to create different types of TUI applications from news readers to animated dashboards to IDEs to agent harnesses to graphics apps.

Features

• 100% managed AOT-compatible code.
• Retained-mode GUI framework with a modern API designed to be easy to use and extend.
• Sub-ms frame rendering times and minimal CPU consumption even with complex displays like multi-tab document editing and syntax highlighting.
• Uses modern terminal features: ANSI/VT control sequences, 24-bit colour, SGR-encoded mouse (mode 1006) with motion tracking, bracketed paste (mode 2004), focus reporting (mode 1004), and the alternate-screen buffer (mode 1049).
• Also support legacy non-ANSI terminal emulators like the classic Windows console.
• Uses Spectre.Console-compatible markup, styles, text rendering, and widgets in a retained-mode rendering pipeline.
• Supports both fixed-width layouts like Grid and flexible, resizable layouts like DockPanel, HorizontalStack, VerticalStack, resizable SplitPanel.
• Large set of common GUI controls: menus, buttons, trees, text inputs with autocomplete, modal dialog windows, etc...., supports easy composition of controls.
• Control frames support adornments like titles, borders, margins, and scrollbars.
• Cross-platform 100% managed code terminal-emulator.
• Multi-tab editor that supports C#, JavaScript, C++, Markdown + a dozen other languages.
• Split-pane interactive editors with preview for Markdown, AsciiDoc, Mermaid documents, Mermaid embedded in Markdown.
• Visualization and graphics: Many different types of plots and graphs like candlestick & heatmap plots & bar/run charts, world maps, sub-cell drawing canvas and shapes, 3D texture rendering, and support for animation.
• Flexible themes that support styling both colors and glyphs independently.
• Headless snapshot testing: render any control or layout to text or PNG without a real terminal.

Requirements

• .NET 10.0 SDK

Building

• Clone the repo with submodules — the build depends on the vendored forks in ext/: git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/allisterb/Jumbee.Console Already cloned without them? Run git submodule update --init --recursive.
• Switch to the repo dir and run the build script: .\build.cmd or ./build

See CONTRIBUTING.md for building, testing, and how the ext/ forks fit together.

Getting Started

Install the package:

dotnet add package Jumbee.Console

Note that Jumbee.Console uses its own compatible version of the Spectre.Console library - you shouldn't add both to your projects.

A first app — a label and a button that increments a counter:

using Jumbee.Console;

using static Jumbee.Console.Color;   // import the static colour names

var count = 0;

var label = new TextLabel(TextLabelOrientation.Horizontal, "Count: 0", Cyan1);
var button = new Button("Increment");

// Change the label text when the button is clicked or pressed
button.Activated += (_, _) =>
{
    count++;
    label.Text = $"Count: {count}";
};

// One column, two rows: the label above the (rounded-bordered) button.
var root = new Grid(
    columnWidths: [30],
    rowHeights: [1, 3],
    controls:
    [
        [label],
        [button],
    ]);

UI.RegisterHotKey(UI.HotKeys.Escape, UI.Stop);   // Esc quits (Ctrl+Q also quits by default)
UI.SetFocus(button);                             // focus it so Enter/Space activates

// Start the UI with a width/height. Mouse/hover need a VtInputSource.
// Returns a Task.
var t = UI.Start(root, width: 34, height: 6, input: new VtInputSource(anyMotion: true));

// Wait until the UI stops.
t.Wait()

For more examples see GETTING-STARTED.md and the documentation and a longer example of building a TUI newsreader.