Overview
cl-tickit is a simple cffi wrapper over libtickit (by 'Leonerd', available at https://launchpad.net/libtickit), a library that provides a full toolkit for developing interactive terminal applications. It is recommended to use the terminfo, cl-ecma-48 and acute-terminal-control libraries to roll your own solution, hence avoiding the obscure foreign library dependency.
Using this library, applications can:
- Render output content and react to input events independently in any window region
- Use fully Unicode-aware string content, including non-BMP, fullwidth and combining characters
- Draw line-art using Unicode box-drawing characters in a variety of styles
- Operate synchronously or asynchronously via file descriptors, or abstractly via byte buffers
- Recognise arbitrary keyboard input, including modifiers
- Make use of multiple terminals, if available, from a single application
- Recognise mouse gestures including mouse wheel and recognition of position reporting greater than 224 columns on terminals that support it
- Use direct-color sequences on terminals that support them, eliminating the need for palettes
Sometime in the future:
- Embed this functionality in a user-provided event loop (once API becomes stable)
- Provide your own virtual terminal (driver) implementation
- use a high level lisp wrapper for common tasks