zig-termbox

termbox-inspired library for creating terminal user interfaces

Works with Zig 0.14.0.

Concepts

termbox is a double-buffered terminal library. This means that when you call functions to draw on the screen, you are not actually sending data to the terminal, but instead act on an intermediate data structure called the back buffer. Only when you call Termbox.present, the terminal is actually updated to reflect the state of the back buffer.

An advantage of this design is that repeated calls to Termbox.present only update the parts of the terminal interface that have actually changed since the last call. termbox achieves this by tracking the current state of the terminal in the internal front buffer.

Examples

const std = @import("std");

const termbox = @import("termbox");
const Termbox = termbox.Termbox;

pub fn main() !void {
    var gpa = std.heap.GeneralPurposeAllocator(.{}){};
    defer _ = gpa.deinit();
    const allocator = gpa.allocator();

    var t = try Termbox.init(allocator);
    defer t.shutdown() catch {};

    var anchor = t.back_buffer.anchor(1, 1);
    try anchor.writer().print("Hello {s}!", .{"World"});

    anchor.move(1, 2);
    try anchor.writer().print("Press any key to quit", .{});

    try t.present();

    _ = try t.pollEvent();
}

Further examples can be found in the examples subdirectory.