gui-cs/terminal.gui

Terminal.Gui is a toolkit for .NET developers who want to build applications that run inside a terminal window rather than in a web browser or desktop window. These are sometimes called TUI apps (terminal user interfaces), and they look similar to the kind of text-based programs you might have seen in old operating systems or server administration tools. With Terminal.Gui, you can build something that looks and behaves like a real application while still running entirely in a command-line window. The toolkit ships with over 50 ready-made interface elements called views. These include text editors with clipboard and undo support, buttons, checkboxes, file and directory browsers, tables that can sort and filter large amounts of data, tree views, progress bars, color pickers, menus, and more. There is also chart and graph support for displaying data visually inside the terminal. You can combine these pieces to build multi-step guided workflows, data entry forms, or full-screen utilities. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux without changes to your code. The rendering uses a double-buffering approach so the screen updates smoothly. It supports TrueColor, Unicode characters, and mouse input, so users are not limited to keyboard-only interaction. You can also build apps that run in-line inside the terminal, scrolling with normal output rather than taking over the full screen, which suits command-line tools that need a quick interactive mode. Installing it is straightforward through the standard .NET package manager. The project includes a UI Catalog demo that lets you browse all the available controls live in your terminal. Version 2.0 (the current release) brought a new layout system inspired by responsive web design, allowing interface elements to resize and reflow based on the terminal window size, along with faster rendering and an updated application architecture. The project is MIT-licensed, has over 10,000 GitHub stars, and has been downloaded more than 1.7 million times.