crossterm

Cross platform terminal library rust

Command Line Libraries & SDKs

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3Mentions

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4.3KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Cross platform terminal library rust

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-01-09 16:49:59 UTC to 2024-05-16 15:54:27 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

3 sources

hiccuphippo·May 16, 2024

Does this mean I can run the Build Your Own Text Editor[0] tutorial in Windows without WSL? I did it in Linux a few years ago, recently heard of Crossterm[1] and was thinking trying to remake it with that, but maybe it's not necessary? [0] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ [1] https://github.com/crossterm-rs/crossterm

In State of the Terminal

soptikha2·Apr 21, 2020

I'll add technical section to readme, but for short. I've used tui-rs[1] with crossterm[2] backend (which handles the actual terminal interaction). The docs may seem intimidating, but it's surprisingly easy to use. I've considered using curses, but tui-rs seemed that it will be easier to handle. I can certainly recommend it for making tui applications. I didn't actually use any documentation at all, it wasn't in the man page and I didn't feel like hunting for it, as it was pretty easy to understand just by looking at the output. Sed debug works by running the code specified just as normal, but it annotates what it does to stdout. So it might look like this: https://gist.github.com/SoptikHa2/a50e90bd1b34c7238944c20d1a... Sed actually has pretty well-designed interface IMO, it's pretty minimal and has no nasty surprises. Edit: Here[3] is so

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mething I've written about it. [1]: https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs [2]: https://github.com/crossterm-rs/crossterm [3]: https://soptik.tech/articles/building-desed-the-sed-debugger...

In Show HN: Desed – Debugger for Sed

JdeBP·Jan 9, 2020

In the 1980s, full-screen TUI programs did significant work to optimize terminal output. A complete redraw of an 80 by 24 screen at 300 BPS was not quick. So applications normally only wrote changes to the screen, only performing a full redraw when requested by a Control-L input (or some such). Terminals have sped up, but the amount of terminal I/O to draw a screen has increased, too. Nowadays there are lengthy SGR 38/48 sequences for 24-bit RGB, plus the other SGR sequences for attributes, plus of course characters that are now commonly multi-byte UTF-8 encodings, including box drawing characters. So the old considerations of optimizing terminal output still apply nowadays to full-screen TUI applications. Optimize out cursor motions that move to where the cursor currently is; replace absolute motions to nearby positions by shorter re

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lative motion control sequences; optimize out superfluous attribute and colour changes; replace onwards horizontal cursor motions by just rewriting the relevant characters; skip unchanged cells; and so forth. * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/79b1c0aab9834a09a59e15d47... The Rust full-screen TUI code in Broot (and common Rust libraries) does not do any of this. * https://github.com/Canop/broot/blob/d8ba179946ad10d777f93b4a... * https://github.com/crossterm-rs/crossterm/blob/41ff73e3d3763... When it is a Win32 application, it uses console I/O and this does not matter quite as much, although it's still a waste of system call context switches to overwrite a console screen buffer with what is already there. But when it is using terminal I/O this matters significantly. The Rust terminal handling is actually fairly poor overall. This list, for example, is in reality a lot longer. The terminfo database records a lot more terminal types that understand these escape sequences. "putty" for one egregiously missing example. * https://github.com/crossterm-rs/crossterm/blob/41ff73e3d3763... * https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-pu... Personally, rather than treat lack of capability as the norm with a paltry list of exceptions, I prefer the opposite assumption that (except for "dumb") the world has nowadays reached 1976 capability levels. (-: * https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/79b1c0aab9834a09a59e15d47...

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