CPP-Terminal is a small and simple library for writing platform independent terminal applications. It works on Windows, MacOS and Linux and offers a simple programming interface. It supports colors, keyboard input and has all the basic features to write any terminal application.

Until 2021, CPP-Terminal used to be a single header library. Now, CPP-Terminal consists out of multiple small and usage oriented headers:

• cpp-terminal/base.hpp: everything for basic Terminal control
• cpp-terminal/input.hpp: functions for gathering input
• cpp-terminal/prompt.hpp: some variations of different prompts
• cpp-terminal/window.hpp: a fully managed terminal window for terminal user interfaces (TUI)
• cpp-terminal/version.hpp: macros with cpp-terminal's version number

The library uses private header for platform dependent code:

• cpp-terminal/private/conversion.hpp: Various conversions
• cpp-terminal/private/platform.hpp: platform dependant code

CPP-Terminal tries to be a small and simple replacement for ncurses. This approach keeps the code small and maintainable, but also easy to extend it's functionality. We limit ourselves to a subset of features that work on all supported platforms without needing to worry about style differences or other changes. Any application written with CPP-Terminal will work everywhere out of the box natively, without emulation or extra work. The small codebase makes CPP-Terminal easy to debug and extend, as well as understanding what happens behind the scenes in the library's core.

Examples

We have created serval examples to show possible use cases of CPP-Terminal and to get you started more quickly. Every example works natively on all platforms in the exact same way:

• base.cpp: basic color, style and unicode demo
• kilo.cpp: the kilo text editor ported to C++ and CPP-Terminal instead of using Linux specific API
• menu.cpp: An interactive menu using only the contents of cpp-terminal/base.hpp
• menu_window.cpp: An interactive menu using the fully managed windowing system from cpp-terminal/window.hpp
• keys.cpp: Interactively shows the keys pressed

Supported platforms

Platform	Supported versions	Coverage by unit test
Windows	10 and higher*	MSVC
(Windows) MSYS2	All supported	/
(Windows) Cygwin	All supported	/
(Windows) MinGW	All supoorted	/
MacOS	All supported	Apple-clang
Linux	All supported	GCC

Windows versions prior Windows 10 are missing the Win32 API functionality for entering the "raw mode" and therefore won't work. They are also lacking ANSI support. See #173 for adding support to prior windows versions for MSVC / Win32.

How to use

Adding CPP-Terminal to your own project is really easy. We have collected various ways with easy how-to's in our documentation.

Documentation

CPP-Terminal's documentation can be found here.

Contributing

Contributing to CPP-Terminal is highly appreciated and can be done in more ways than code. Extending it's functionality, reporting or fixing bugs and extending the documentations are just a few of them.

License

CPP-Terminal is licensed under the terms of the MIT License by Ondřej Čertík.