PrettyPrompt

A cross-platform command line prompt that provides syntax highlighting, autocompletion, history and more! It's Console.ReadLine() on steroids.

Features

• User Experience (UX) features:
  • Syntax highlighting support via ANSI escape sequences. Supports both the terminal color palette and full RGB colors.
  • Autocompletion menu, with extended documentation tooltips
  • Multi-line input
  • Word-wrapping
  • History navigation, optionally persistent across sessions, with history filtering (similar to PSReadLine's HistorySearchBackward).
  • Unsurprising keybindings: Home, End, Ctrl-L to clear screen, Ctrl-C to cancel current line, Ctrl+Space to open autocomplete menu, and more.
  • Cross platform copy/paste: Ctrl-Shift-C for copy, Ctrl-V or Shift-Insert for pasting.
  • Works "in-line" on the command line; it doesn't take over the entire terminal window.
• Developer Experience (DX) features:
  • Provides a CancellationToken for each prompt result, so the end-user of your application can cancel long running tasks via Ctrl-C.
  • Supports registering callbacks for key presses, to customize application behavior.
  • Optionally detects incomplete lines and converts Enter to a "soft newline" (Shift-Enter).
  • Fast rendering—PrettyPrompt only renders the diff of what changed, so the screen doesn't flicker as text is redrawn.

Installation

PrettyPrompt can be installed from nuget by running the following command:

dotnet add package PrettyPrompt

Usage

A simple read-eval-print-loop looks like this:

var prompt = new Prompt();

while (true)
{
    var response = await prompt.ReadLineAsync("> ");
    if (response.IsSuccess) // false if user cancels, i.e. ctrl-c
    {
        if (response.Text == "exit") break;

        Console.WriteLine("You wrote " + response.Text);
    }
}

The Prompt constructor takes optional configuration options for enabling syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and soft-newline configuration. For a more complete example, see the project in the examples directory. If you have the dotnet example global tool installed, run the following command in the repository root:

dotnet example FruitPrompt

Building from source

This application target .NET 5, and can be built with either Visual Studio or the normal dotnet build command line tool.