termbox-go

Looks cool, but nothing much happens for me. I used brew to install go, then ran the following: % type -a go /usr/local/bin/go % cd tsukae % go get -d ./... go: downloading github.com/inconshreveable/mousetrap v1.0.0 % go run main.go o: downloading github.com/spf13/cobra v1.1.3 go: downloading github.com/gizak/termui/v3 v3.1.0 go: downloading github.com/mattn/go-runewidth v0.0.2 go: downloading github.com/nsf/termbox-go v0.0.0-20190121233118-02980233997d go: downloading github.com/mitchellh/go-wordwrap v0.0.0-20150314170334-ad45545899c7 go: downloading github.com/spf13/pflag v1.0.5 ...a whole lot of usage information... ...but nothing useful (not a go person, so, YMMV).... Any ideas? FYI, % go version go version go1.16 darwin/amd64

If you mean the general principle of this kind of pseudo-GUI in text mode, look into codepage 437 [1]. It's possible to do more advanced stuff with custom glyphs [3], but it doesn't look like this does anything like that - it generally requires direct hardware access to modify the font. This was a pretty common technique in 90s DOS programs, but it can be tricky to get working cross platform over a serial terminal. The library you found seems to rely on termbox [2] for that. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 [2] https://github.com/nsf/termbox-go (edit) [3] I thought Norton Commander did this, but I was mistaken - it just uses codepage 437. It was Norton Utilities [4]. [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA-compatible_text_mode

If you want some kind of abstraction termbox is a pretty reasonable level above straight ncurses. There's also termbox-go fwiw. https://github.com/nsf/termbox https://github.com/nsf/termbox-go

You absolutely can. That said, if your application is to look quite static and you don't really need the game-style render-loop, you could use Termbox directly (it's great): https://github.com/nsf/termbox-go

Let me also plug this great little building block that this library is using: http://github.com/nsf/termbox-go

Termbox can be implemented on non-POSIX platforms, whereas terminfo/termcap do not. See https://github.com/nsf/termbox-go which runs on Windows. NB: The C implementation doesn't support Windows, AFAIK, which means this Rust library doesn't either, at least as long as it is based on bindings and not a pure Rust implementation of termbox.

This[1] emacs inspired editor, written in Go, also uses termbox (pure go port: https://github.com/nsf/termbox-go) - great little library. I'm rewriting a python command line utility using it and it makes writing text based interfaces much easier. [1] https://github.com/nsf/godit (screenshot: http://nosmileface.ru/images/godit-linux1.png)

There's a package that does that: https://github.com/nsf/termbox-go

Sadly that's mostly still work in progress. OpenGL bindings are at https://github.com/go-gl For 2D graphics there's promising project at https://github.com/skelterjohn/go.wde which provides interface that you can use together with http://golang.org/pkg/image/draw (Issue worth noting is that none of the platforms specific parts in go.wde yet have hardware acceleration so it's not yet ready for game development etc. It's quite possible that that'll change in the future though :) ) And for ascii graphics we have https://github.com/nsf/termbox-go There are bunch of other libraries as well but these are the ones that I'm more or less constantly using. go.wde is probably closest to what you were looking for but also the one that still requires hardware acceleration before it can properly be used as fast canvas for experimenting with games etc.