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nsf
termbox
C2011–2020
nsf / termbox

termbox

Library for writing text-based user interfaces

10Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Library for writing text-based user interfaces

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 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 year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-09-30 10:07:26 UTC to 2020-06-04 10:22:47 UTC.

0122011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020

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

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

10 sources
I've been thinking about this a long time[1][2]. At the moment, I think "build or reuse?" is the wrong question to ask. * Reusing someone else's implementation gives you the benefit of an initial kickstart. It also can give you future benefits: a library may contain improvements that you may need in the future, at which point you get them for free. Infinite productivity! * Building your own implementation has an initial cost, but it reduces your maintenance burden to only the features you actually use. It also insulates you from counterparties whose interests may not align exactly with your own, or who accidentally introduce security risks. If only we could magically unbundle the benefits of other people's code from their limitations, have features magically appear when we need them, and be magically robust to security holes in features w
Read the rest
e don't use. Here's the closest I've been able to get so far: Use libraries by copying them. Let's see why this is good. For starters, it makes you robust to the leftpad failure mode. The library is literally copied into your repository. Who cares how small it is anymore?! It could literally vanish off the face of the rest of the earth, and your code would continue to work. A less obvious benefit is that copying a library puts you on a trajectory of taking responsibility for your dependencies. You don't need to understand all of it on day 1, but as you use it and run into issues you should be gradually understanding its internals better, gradually resolving features that you use, and features that you don't. That then gives you the option to rip out stuff you're sure you'll never need. Or to rip out stuff you may need in future, but is easy to put back (this is analogous to deleting code without fear because version control). I consider an example of exemplary library use to be how I copied the termbox library into Mu (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/5f1285238b), periodically merged commits from upstream (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/9ba313ab7f), gradually cleaned it up to fit better with my project (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/9a31c34f0f), and gradually stripped out code from it that Mu does not require (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/c04baba4f2; https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/8e7827dfcf; https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/547ec78bf2). In the process I made some wrong turns, deleting features that I later decided I wanted (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/10a3b8cca2) and created bugs for myself (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/3315a7d3bb; https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/0c0d1ea5cd). But when it did things I didn't want, I was now empowered to change them (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/ee1a18f050). One of my patches was useful upstream, so I submitted it: https://github.com/nsf/termbox/commit/0730826a07. I would be in no position to submit that patch if I hadn't taken the trouble to understand termbox's internals. And that shows a final benefit of copying and privately forking libraries: it makes you a better citizen of the open source world, because open source depends on eyeballs, and using a library blindly helps nobody except your (extremely short-term) self. Now you may say, this sounds like a lot of work. I can't do it for all the libraries I use. Start small. Pick one dependency that is pretty central to your project, bring it in. See how you like it. As you gain experience come tell me what you discover. (My email is in my profile.) I didn't have all this thought out when I copied termbox into Mu. Benefits gradually became apparent. [1] http://akkartik.name/post/libraries [2] http://akkartik.name/post/libraries2 (Past versions of this comment: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=20213; https://lobste.rs/s/w4auk6/more_shell_less_egg_all_this#c_nv...)
In Ask HN: When do you use a library vs. implement something yourself?
Some time ago I built a (terminal) text editor and one of the challenges is to implement the renderer which is normally done by messing with termios and changing some terminal parameters - as this is "device"-dependent there exist databases like terminfo and abstraction-layers like curses which give you an API similar to "Write this text at position x/y in green". However curses and terminfo are big programs and most terminals they support are not in use anymore, so if one is OK with supporting just 99.9 (and not 99.999 like curses)% of modern terminals (say xterm, linux-console, st, urxvt, $otherterm), it is feasible to roll your own or use an alternative like e.g. termbox (https://github.com/nsf/termbox). It provides a simple API like "write Unicode-Char to position x/y in specific $style" and some utility functions to setup the termina
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l (e.g. one has to consider how to react to window-size (== terminal rows/cols size) events). You can then write your app similar to a game-loop like the following: while state['should_run']: render(state) update(state) get_input(state) I think such an API is pretty nice to work with - this is different to the React approach, but for writing terminal GUIs like text editors it worked pretty well for me. Many (native) games use a similar approach when rendering menu's and stuff and although there are terrible ones most menus of games look pretty slick.
In Ink: React for interactive command-line apps

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