Re: [ANN] cross terminal terminal library for Lua released

I really love and can appreciate the work you've done here. I developed a collection of shell libraries, written in lua. I'm familiar with the work you've done here, and I think you've organized it very nicely.
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From: 'Thijs Schreijer' via lua-l <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, June 7, 2026 8:18 PM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: [ANN] cross terminal terminal library for Lua released

List,

happy to announce that I have finally released the first version (0.1.0) of the `terminal` library<https://github.com/lunarmodules/terminal.lua>. It is a cross-platform terminal library supporting *nix and bsd variants, and Windows, and Lua versions 5.1 to 5.5. Some 18 months ago I announced its existence<https://groups.google.com/g/lua-l/c/JOwxp1k4Y_E/m/9JkM_XJFBwAJ>, lots of high-level functionality has been added since. First commit was 2 years ago.

This library does not depend on external libraries (e.g. curses, ncurses, SDL and the likes). It relies only on LuaSystem<https://github.com/lunarmodules/luasystem/> (and utf8 lib for older Lua versions), this should make it a lot easier to build (especially on Windows), since LuaSystem only binds to platform APIs. So for a novice on Windows it should be easier to get this operational. A working LuaRocks installation should get anyone up and running, no fiddling required with external .dll/.so files and/or development headers to build it.

Installation: `luarocks install terminal`

Low-level features:

  *   Full UTF-8 support for emojis and other Unicode characters. Advanced string handling for UTF-8 characters as well as display columns.
  *   Non-blocking keyboard input; enabling coroutine based multithreading with background tasks, no more `io.read` blocking everything. (a line-editor was written in Lua to enable this).
  *   Core terminal functionality to setup streams non-blocking, canonical mode, etc, and ANSI control sequence support (colors, cursor movements, etc)
  *   Mechanisms over policies; the library will not claim the main loop, nor does it bring in an event system or require callback-spaghetti. It can be easily hooked up, but doesn't force this upon the user (this was the main issue I had with most other UI libraries)

High-level functionality:

  *   CLI widgets<https://lunarmodules.github.io/terminal.lua/topics/04-cli_widgets.md.html>; selections (radio button), multi-select (checkboxes), text input prompts, progress bars and spinners, etc.
  *   Full-screen UIs<https://lunarmodules.github.io/terminal.lua/topics/05-fullscreen_ui.md.html>; panel system with automatic layouts, headers, footers, text panels with word-wrapping scrolling etc, confirmation dialog boxes,<https://lunarmodules.github.io/terminal.lua/topics/05-fullscreen_ui.md.html#Dialogs______ui_panel_Confirm_> tabstrip<https://lunarmodules.github.io/terminal.lua/topics/05-fullscreen_ui.md.html#Tab_strip_panel______ui_panel_TabStrip_>, and more
  *   Canvas;<https://lunarmodules.github.io/terminal.lua/topics/06-canvas.md.html#canvas_Viewport> unicode braille char based canvas to be used from either CLI or full-screen UIs. Drawing primitives; dots, lines, ellipses, arcs, polygons (optionally filled). It even includes a time series graph<https://lunarmodules.github.io/terminal.lua/topics/06-canvas.md.html#canvas_TimeSeriesGraph>.

Rationale:

Ever since I started with Lua I have wondered how to make it easier for novices (like me at the time) to get started. I still think that most will start from a Windows environment (as I did), which just makes it extra hard to get started. Just setting up a compiler and using a cli is already a challenge, let alone building stuff from source, binding to external libraries and what not.

Hence a number of my projects have always been aimed at making it easier to get started with Lua and to enable a novice to still write a fully functional application, with a focus on cross-platform support. A Windows specific example is LuaWinMake<https://github.com/Tieske/luawinmake> and LuaWinMulti<https://github.com/Tieske/luawinmulti>, the former is a simple standalone Windows batch file that (given a working compiler) will build any Lua version (5.1-5.5) from source without needing `make`, `cygwin`, etc. The latter uses the former and adds a LuaRocks installation.

I have maintained (and extended) Copas<https://github.com/lunarmodules/copas> for this purpose over the years (evolved from a socket scheduler to a generic coroutine scheduler). And with the addition of this new terminal library I feel like I'm finally closing the loop; adding UI capabilities, and non-blocking keyboard input.

If you read this far; thanks :)
Please give it a spin, all feedback welcome.

Big shout out to the GSoC students (selected and non-selected) for helping out adding features and fixing bugs!

Thijs

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