tcell

Tcell is a Go module that provides a cell based view for text user interfaces. It was inspired by termbox, and builds on the excellent work of the original gdamore/tcell project. It is hosted on Github.

About this fork

This is a fork of gdamore/tcell, tailored for a more focused use-case. The upstream project supports a very broad range of environments and features, including things like WebAssembly. This fork trims the scope to keep the backend small and fast for our needs.

The main differences from upstream are:

• The widget and view packages have been removed (we use rune-go-sdk's component and handler packages for those).
• The screen interface has been simplified and refactored to work better with event loops. The render path is now lock-free, with a focus on reducing allocations per render.

These changes make the backend lighter and faster for the kind of TUI applications we build. The benchmarks below show the effect of these optimizations on our integration suite:

benchmark                                                 old ns/op     new ns/op     delta
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_large-10                     22075794      1907189       -91.36%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_medium-10                    3347864       88311         -97.36%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_small-10                     446367        10658         -97.61%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_large_with_resize-10         19868033      3121991       -84.29%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_medium_with_resize-10        4043734       136762        -96.62%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_small_with_resize-10         723866        22815         -96.85%

benchmark                                                 old allocs     new allocs     delta
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_large-10                     17570          0              -100.00%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_medium-10                    2815           0              -100.00%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_small-10                     398            0              -100.00%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_large_with_resize-10         198972         0              -100.00%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_medium_with_resize-10        10541          0              -100.00%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_small_with_resize-10         1329           0              -100.00%

benchmark                                                 old bytes     new bytes     delta
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_large-10                     200315        3130          -98.44%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_medium-10                    34947         145           -99.59%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_small-10                     5556          20            -99.64%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_large_with_resize-10         20368081      9569687       -53.02%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_medium_with_resize-10        878374        388256        -55.80%
BenchmarkIntegration/tscreen_small_with_resize-10         109314        48380         -55.74%

If your project needs the full feature set, broad platform support, or the widget/view packages, we recommend using the upstream gdamore/tcell directly. Many thanks to the original authors for their work, which made this fork possible.

Development

Clone the repository:

git clone git@github.com:unstablebuild/tcell.git

Install pre-commit if you haven't already. Then install this repo's pre-commit hook git/hooks/pre-commit by running:

pre-commit install

Compile:

go build ./...

Run the test suite:

go test ./...

Cross-compile to many combinations of platform and OS:

./test_crosscompile.sh