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Welcome to Blinki

Modern, beautiful Text User Interfaces for Delphi — without the pain.

Blinki is an open-source Delphi library for building rich Terminal User Interface (TUI) applications. Instead of hand-coding ANSI escape sequences, managing screen buffers, or tracking dirty regions yourself, Blinki gives you a declarative widget tree, a constraint-based layout engine, and a built-in double-buffered renderer — all driven by a clean, single-threaded event loop.

Write Delphi, see a polished UI in the terminal.

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Why Blinki?

Problem	Blinki's answer
Manual ANSI sequences are error-prone and hard to maintain	TTuiCanvas.WriteAt, FillRect, DrawBox — no escape codes in application code
Screen flicker when repainting	Double-buffer + diff renderer: only changed cells are emitted, in a single Write call per frame
Absolute coordinate arithmetic	Constraint-based layout (Fixed, Fill, Min, Max, Percentage) — widgets place themselves
Colour portability (16 / 256 / True Color)	TTuiColor supports Default terminal, Standard 16, xterm-256, and 24-bit RGB
Boilerplate for keyboard / mouse	TTuiApp dispatches events, manages the focus ring, and handles Tab / Shift-Tab automatically
No reusable widgets	Ready-made library: Button, TextInput, Select, Checkbox, Table, ProgressBar, Tabs, Dialog, Toast …
Hard to theme consistently	Semantic TTuiTheme (Primary, Background, Surface, Text, …) — switch Dark ↔ Light at runtime
Emoji rendering breaks on grapheme clusters	Blinki.Core.Unicode (TTuiUnicode) segments ZWJ sequences, skin tones, and flags as single glyphs; Blinki.Core.Emoji expands :shortcode: text

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Quick Links

🚀 Getting Started	Install, build, and write your first TUI in minutes
🏗️ Architecture & Advanced Usage	Event loop, rendering pipeline, custom widgets
🤝 Contributing	Style guide, coding standards, PR workflow

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Hello, Blinki!

The smallest possible Blinki application — a label that exits on Ctrl+Q:

program HelloBlinki;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  System.SysUtils,
  Blinki.Core.App,
  Blinki.Core.Input,
  Blinki.Core.Widget,
  Blinki.Widgets.Labels,
  Blinki.Layout.Stack;

var
  LApp: TTuiApp;
  LRoot: TTuiVStack;
  LLabel: TTuiLabel;
begin
  ReportMemoryLeaksOnShutdown := True;

  LApp := TTuiApp.Create;
  LRoot := TTuiVStack.Create;            // root widget — owns all children
  try
    LLabel := TTuiLabel.Create(LRoot);   // parent receives ownership
    LLabel.Text := '  Hello, Blinki!  Press Ctrl+Q to quit.';

    LApp.SetRoot(LRoot);

    LApp.OnKeyPress := procedure(const AKey: TTuiKeyEvent)
      begin
        if (AKey.Code = kcChar) and (kmCtrl in AKey.Modifiers) and (AKey.Character = #17) then
          LApp.Quit;  // Ctrl+Q
      end;

    LApp.Run;  // blocks until Quit is called; restores the terminal on exit
  finally
    LApp.Free; // frees App → frees LRoot → frees LLabel
  end;
end.

That is the complete program. No initialization file, no component registration, no form designer. Add <repo>\Source to your project's Unit Search Path and compile.

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Widget Catalogue (v0.1.0)

Layout containers — Blinki.Layout.*

TTuiVStack · TTuiHStack · TTuiGrid · TTuiScrollable

Widgets — Blinki.Widgets.*

TTuiLabel · TTuiButton · TTuiBox · TTuiTextInput · TTuiTextArea · TTuiCheckbox · TTuiRadioButton · TTuiSelect · TTuiTabs · TTuiMenu · TTuiSidebar · TTuiTable · TTuiProgressBar · TTuiGauge · TTuiBarChart · TTuiSparkline · TTuiBadge · TTuiSpinner · TTuiToast · TTuiAlert · TTuiDialog · TTuiInputDialog · TTuiProgressDialog · TTuiMatrixRain · TTuiWaveAnimation · TTuiTypingEffect

FX & Animation — Blinki.FX.*

DrawGradient (Blinki.FX.Gradient) — true-color horizontal gradient on a text string, plus the LerpColor helper it is built on.

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Project Status

Blinki is highly experimental and under active, heavy development. APIs may change between releases without notice.

Item	Detail
Version	0.1.0
Licence	MIT
Delphi	13.1 Florence (37.0) or later
Platform	Win32 console (Windows 10 build 10586+)
True Color	Windows 10 v1903+ (build 18362+) required
Linux / macOS	Linux64 supported via the real POSIX backend (termios raw mode, poll(2)); macOS and other POSIX systems are untested
Repository	github.com/marcobreveglieri/blinki