dankamongmen

I'm the author of a blingful TUI/character graphics library by the name of Notcurses. One of the core competencies of Notcurses is rendering images and video to a terminal (without undue shrinking of the font). Leaving aside asymmetric rendering such as that performed by caca (see Notcurses documentation for an explanation of why I don't think this a good general approach), common symmetric rendering techniques include spaces and Unicode half blocks ( and ). This last method is employed by tools like viu and mpv's TCT output, and can be considered the general "state of the art".

Notcurses had already gone past this with its Quadblitter, making use of Unicode 3.2's quadrant blocks to map 2x2 pixels to a terminal cell. With the advent of Unicode 13's Legacy Computing Symbols (and rollout of font support for them), a powerful new symmetric blitting method is made available, mapping 3 rows of 2 columns each to a single cell. This blitter is available as NCBLIT_3x2 in the upcoming Notcurses 2.0.3. I was worried that color loss would be more of a problem, but it ended up looking great!

The following images are rendered using all four blitters:

https://nick-black.com/images/worldmap-sexblitter.png (left to right: S, Q, H, ASCII)

https://nick-black.com/images/sexblitter-perfection.png (clockwise from upper left: ASCII, H, Q, S)

The algorithm is described here: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1086

code here: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/src/lib/blit.c

notcurses: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php?title=Notcurses

hype video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYhZ7myXyyg

enjoy! hack on!

I just cut 1.1.0 of my new(ish) TUI library, notcurses. I started work on it back in November, and it's now IMHO pretty fit for general use.

1.1.0 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H1WkopWJNM

github: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

wiki: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses

notcurses is an obvious intellectual descendant of NCURSES, which Thomas E. Dickey has masterfully developed and maintained for decades. notcurses breaks away from the prelapsarian X/Open Curses API, but its interface will be quite familiar to experienced NCURSES programmers. For new TUI developers, I hope that notcurses has fewer gotchas than NCURSES. notcurses supports 24-bit DirectColor RGB as its primary color specification (though palette indexed color is also supported, for its bandwidth benefits).

Almost anything you can do in NCURSES can be done in notcurses, though a few things (most especially menus) must currently be handrolled. In addition, there's rich support for various types of transparency/color blending, image rendering, fades, giant virtual planes, z-axis depths of thousands of planes, and other good stuff.

Experimental Python wrappers are included in this release. I hope to cut C++ and Rust wrappers soon.

Please take a look, and give the demo a local run if you've the time. Feedback and/or bug reports would both be invaluable.

If you'd like to see a real app using notcurses, my growlight tool has been adapted to it:

https://github.com/dankamongmen/growlight

This was several thousand lines of NCURSES UI code. Switching it to notcurses was a generally painless procedure of a few hours.