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Welcome to the RetUI documentation.

RetUI is a modern terminal UI framework for Go that helps you build rich, interactive terminal applications using familiar component-based patterns. Instead of manually managing terminal drawing, keyboard events, and layout calculations, you describe your interface with components, and RetUI takes care of rendering and updates.

Whether you're building dashboards, administration tools, text-based applications, file managers, or developer tools, RetUI provides the building blocks to create responsive terminal interfaces with clean, maintainable code.

Why RetUI?

Terminal applications should be simple to build, not difficult to maintain.

RetUI was created to bring modern UI concepts to the terminal while keeping the framework lightweight and fast.

Some of the features include:

• Component-based architecture
• Flexbox-inspired layout engine
• Efficient rendering that updates only what changed
• Built-in keyboard focus management
• React-inspired hooks for state management
• Styling with borders, colors, and padding
• Reusable UI components
• Pure Go with no external runtime

Documentation

• Getting Started
• Installation
• Your First Application
• Core Concepts
• Layout System
• Components
• Hooks
• Styling
• Navigation & Focus
• Examples
• Performance
• FAQ
• Contributing

Philosophy

RetUI is built around a few simple ideas:

• Keep the API small and easy to learn.
• Make layouts predictable.
• Render efficiently.
• Encourage reusable components.
• Make keyboard navigation a first-class feature.
• Stay lightweight and dependency-friendly.

Who is RetUI for?

RetUI is suitable for developers building:

• Terminal dashboards
• CLI tools with interactive interfaces
• System monitoring applications
• Database clients
• File managers
• Developer utilities
• Text-based productivity applications

Getting Started

If you're new to RetUI, begin with:

1. Installation
2. Hello World
3. Layout System
4. Components
5. Hooks

These pages introduce the core concepts you'll use in almost every RetUI application.

Community

RetUI is an open-source project, and contributions of all sizes are welcome. If you find a bug, have an idea for a new feature, or want to improve the documentation, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

Happy coding!