ANSITerm

Cross-platform .NET Standard 2.0 library for working with terminals.

API Documentation

Installation

dotnet add package ANSITerm

Features

• 8, 16, 256-color and true color modes
• Automatic conversion between colors (nearest RGB)
• Uses ANSI sequences if supported
• Supports alternative buffer via tput, emulated on Windows cmd
• Platform-independent cursor positioning as defined by ANSI
• Interface is close to System.Console, things that don't work on all supported platforms were removed

Details

Currently there are two backends - StdBackend and ANSIBackend. First one mostly wraps corefx Console class, second one uses ANSI sequences.

Windows

Supported terminals (no configuration):

• Windows CMD (std) - has maximum of 16 colors
• ConEmu (ANSI) - true color support is assumed
• mintty (ANSI) - true color support is assumed

Working terminals needing configuration:

• MobaXTerm - $LINES and $ROWS environment variables must be set, also stty -echo -icanon min 1 time 0 should be run prior to launching (use stty sane to restore terminal settings).

ANSI backend is used if any of these variables is set:

• CONEMUANSI=ON (set by ConEmu)
• MSYSCON (set by MSYS2, should contain path to mintty)
• TERM (set by MobaXTerm)

Linux and OS X

ANSI backend is used. Information about color count, keys and other stuff is grabbed from terminfo using corefx TermInfo.

Example

using ANSITerm;

// ...
var term = ANSIConsole.GetInstance();
term.SetFullscreen(true);
term.SetCursorPosition(10, 10);
term.ForegroundColor = new ColorValue(Color.Lime);
term.WriteLine("Hello, world! Press ENTER to exit.");
term.ReadLine();

Can I replace ncurses with it?

Well, no. It's closer to Python colorama library, but has some additional features. This project is aimed to be a simple and lightweight, and to contain only core functions that should work on all major platforms.