brick
is a Haskell terminal user interface (TUI) programming toolkit.
To use it, you write a pure function that describes how your user
interface should be drawn based on your current application state and
you provide a state transformation function to handle events.
brick
exposes a declarative API. Unlike most GUI toolkits which
require you to write a long and tedious sequence of "create a widget,
now bind an event handler", brick
just requires you to describe your
interface using a set of declarative layout combinators.
Under the hood, this library builds upon vty, so some knowledge of Vty will be helpful in using this library.
Example
Here's an example interface (see programs/ReadmeDemo.hs
):
joinBorders $
withBorderStyle unicode $
borderWithLabel (str "Hello!") $
(center (str "Left") <+> vBorder <+> center (str "Right"))
Result:
┌─────────Hello!─────────┐
│ │ │
│ │ │
│ Left │ Right │
│ │ │
│ │ │
└───────────┴────────────┘
Featured Projects
To get an idea of what some people have done with brick
, check out
these projects. If you have made something and would like me to include
it, get in touch!
Project | Description |
---|---|
tetris |
An implementation of the Tetris game |
gotta-go-fast |
A typing tutor |
haskell-player |
An afplay frontend |
mushu |
An MPD client |
matterhorn |
A client for Mattermost |
viewprof |
A GHC profile viewer |
tart |
A mouse-driven ASCII art drawing program |
silly-joy |
An interpreter for Joy |
herms |
A command-line tool for managing kitchen recipes |
purebred |
A mail user agent |
2048Haskell |
An implementation of the 2048 game |
bhoogle |
A Hoogle client |
clifm |
A file manager |
towerHanoi |
Animated solutions to The Tower of Hanoi |
VOIDSPACE |
A space-themed typing-tutor game |
solitaire |
The card game |
sudoku-tui |
A Sudoku implementation |
summoner-tui |
An interactive frontend to the Summoner tool |
wrapping-editor |
An embeddable editor with support for Brick |
git-brunch |
A git branch checkout utility |
hascard |
A program for reviewing "flash card" notes |
ttyme |
A TUI for Harvest |
ghcup |
A TUI for ghcup , the Haskell toolchain manager |
cbookview |
A TUI for exploring polyglot chess opening book files |
thock |
A modern TUI typing game featuring online racing against friends |
fifteen |
An implementation of the 15 puzzle |
maze |
A Brick-based maze game |
pboy |
A tiny PDF organizer |
hyahtzee2 |
Famous Yahtzee dice game |
brewsage |
A TUI for Homebrew |
sandwich |
A test framework with a TUI interface |
youbrick |
A feed aggregator and launcher for Youtube channels |
swarm |
A 2D programming and resource gathering game |
hledger-ui |
A terminal UI for the hledger accounting system. |
hledger-iadd |
An interactive terminal UI for adding hledger journal entries |
wordle |
An implementation of the Wordle game |
kpxhs |
An interactive Keepass database viewer |
htyper |
A typing speed test program |
ullekha |
An interactive terminal notes/todo app with file/redis persistence |
These third-party packages also extend brick
:
Project | Description |
---|---|
brick-filetree [Hackage] |
A widget for exploring a directory tree and selecting or flagging files and directories |
Release Announcements / News
Find out about brick
releases and other news on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/brick_haskell/
Getting Started
Check out the many demo programs to get a feel for different aspects of the library:
$ cabal new-build -f demos
$ find dist-newstyle -type f -name \*-demo
To get started, see the user guide.
Documentation
Documentation for brick
comes in a variety of forms:
- The official brick user guide
- Samuel Tay's brick tutorial
- Haddock (all modules)
- Demo programs (Screenshots)
- FAQ
Feature Overview
brick
comes with a bunch of batteries included:
- Vertical and horizontal box layout widgets
- Basic single- and multi-line text editor widgets
- List and table widgets
- Progress bar widget
- Simple dialog box widget
- Border-drawing widgets (put borders around or in between things)
- Generic scrollable viewports and viewport scroll bars
- General-purpose layout control combinators
- Extensible widget-building API
- User-customizable attribute themes
- Type-safe, validated input form API (see the
Brick.Forms
module) - A filesystem browser for file and directory selection
- Borders can be configured to automatically connect!
Brick-Users Discussion
The brick-users
Google Group / e-mail list is a place to discuss
library changes, give feedback, and ask questions. You can subscribe at:
https://groups.google.com/group/brick-users
Status
There are some places were I have deliberately chosen to worry about
performance later for the sake of spending more time on the design
(and to wait on performance issues to arise first). brick
is also
something of an experimental project of mine and some aspects of the
design involve trade-offs that might not be right for your application.
Brick is not intended to be all things to all people; rather, I want it
to provide a good foundation for building complex terminal interfaces
in a declarative style to take away specific headaches of building,
modifying, and working with such interfaces, all while seeing how far we
can get with a pure function to specify the interface.
brick
exports an extension API that makes it possible to make your own
packages and widgets. If you use that, you'll also be helping to test
whether the exported interface is usable and complete!
Reporting bugs
Please file bug reports as GitHub issues. For best results:
-
Include the versions of relevant software packages: your terminal emulator,
brick
,ghc
, andvty
will be the most important ones. -
Clearly describe the behavior you expected ...
-
... and include a minimal demonstration program that exhibits the behavior you actually observed.
Contributing
If you decide to contribute, that's great! Here are some guidelines you should consider to make submitting patches easier for all concerned:
- If you want to take on big things, talk to me first; let's have a design/vision discussion before you start coding. Create a GitHub issue and we can use that as the place to hash things out.
- Please make changes consistent with the conventions I've used in the codebase.
- Please adjust or provide Haddock and/or user guide documentation relevant to any changes you make.
- New commits should be
-Wall
clean. - Please do NOT include package version changes in your patches. Package version changes are only done at release time when the full scope of a release's changes can be evaluated to determine the appropriate version change.